You absolutely should have a choice.

But if you did, and don't pay taxes, you shouldn't get to benefit from the things those taxes pay for.

"Why should I have to pay for a fire department? My house isn't on fire..."

I think that this started as an argument about a specific thing that taxes are spent on – fighting income inequality. But now you have identified (mistakenly, by the way) the political ideology that, as you think, stands behind my opinions, and are arguing against this political ideology as a whole.

Can we agree on fire departments, roads and military and get back to discussing welfare state, please?

Edit: oh, and by the way, just as lighthouses were actually built by private organizations in Adam Smith's time, 70% of US firefighters are volunteers.

It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.

EDIT: As for specific things that taxes should pay for, no, I don't think there's a lot of room for agreement. I know a nontrivial number of people who sincerely believe that roads, for example, should be wholly privatized. You and I may think fire departments and roads matter, but we aren't the only parties to that debate. We don't get to decide for them.

I personally don't want the fruits of my labor, in the form of taxes, being used to bomb civilians (specifically, non-combatants) on the other side of the planet. I don't get that say, and I find murder far more repugnant than "theft".

How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?

> It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.

That's exactly my point - he used lighthouses as an example for redistribution through government, and he was famously wrong, as lighthouses were not primarily built by the government. So this is very similar to using fire departments now.

> How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?

I see a lot of criticism to US military involvement that takes only lost lives into account and does not even try to calculate all the lives, lost and saved, to see if utility function ends up above or below zero. Therefore, I can't take this arguments seriously.

That you apparently think there's a "utility function" in play in bombing civilians suggests to me there is no meaningful possibility of dialogue here. Between that and your position that taxes which are used to support the least fortunate among us are "theft" (but not the taxes used to buy bombs — meaning that it's how they're used, not whether they're collected at all, that you take issue with), I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview. I so utterly can't relate to that, that we may as well be speaking different languages.

> I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview

Curious - how did you come to such a strange conclusion?

You should not

a) Because people are selfish idiots

b) Because society functions on compromises

c) Because your house being on fire increases the probability of your neighbor's house being on fire.

My position is that people who think "taxes are theft" should have to face a world where the things those taxes pay for aren't available to them.

I'm pretty sure, with, as Einstein put it, "a probability approaching unity", that they would change their minds very quickly about whether those things are worth supporting.

It's a purely rhetorical position, of course; I do not actually advocate anyone suffer that experience — because it would be a thing they could only suffer.

EDIT: I'm reminded again of the rural, dues-based fire departments. You're free not to pay your dues. If your house catches fire and you haven't paid, the fire crew will come out, stop at your property line, keep the fire from spreading, and otherwise watch your shit burn. Libertarian paradise, or something...

My apologies if my comment was abrasive, my objection, though, is that pandering to this libertarian slice of the populace ends up costing society more. On a small scale that dues-based fire department might work fine "Oh, it's at frank's house, yea... he'll be surprised" but when you reach a state or country level tracking any sort of voluntary pay-in programs gets complicated and a sane efficient state would find it cheaper to just save frank's house anyways, because the cost of tracking who is who is more expensive than occasionally paying out fraudulently.

This is one of the good motivations for universal basic income, a lot of our social programs have grown to the point where their overhead is getting ridiculous but the solution isn't ending the program, it's cutting any inefficiencies we can find and simplifying the program in a fair manner to get more money to where it needs to go.