It’s not a meme. It’s a proper question to those who decry taxation as theft. Without taxation who would pay for government services? Your complaint about the road system indicates that taxes ought to be higher or are currently misallocated. The ire is not at the concept of taxation it’s at the allocation and level of taxation.

The fact that a government agency fails to provide the services you're taxed to pay for does not mean they should get more money. I pay far higher taxes where I live now than when I lived in an openly socialist country that had better roads, faster police response times, better (and universal) healthcare. Every time I dig into specific government projects the amount of waste and corruption is disgusting. Wanting to throw more money at it is stupid, and the burden of proof is not on the people who want to be taxed less that it's actually doing anything.

You apparently missed the “or are misallocated” part and completely missed the point of what I wrote. It seems like you are doing some projecting. My post does not in any way imply a “throw more money” attitude. Also, the original statement I responded to was an attitude that taxation is theft. It was not a statement about whether or not taxes should be reduced. Indeed, in my first post I specifically mentioned that reasonable people can and do question taxation levels.

I have complaints about the roads in the area where I live, and also how my taxes are spent.

If I didn't have roads in the area where I live, I wouldn't complain about it, I'd leave.

There's a pretty big difference between these two situations. It's easy to focus on the bad side of taxes, but it's important not to forget that they pay for some very basic stuff that shouldn't be taken for granted. There are plenty of things we would disagree about spending taxes on, I'm sure, but it's rather silly to pretend that you disagree with the existence of taxes completely when in fact you depend on them.

You may have noticed that I'm not saying taxation is theft. I'm saying I'm against the massive portion of government spending that I think is rank with abuse, waste and misuse of power. I actually spent several days in the last year looking into what my property taxes are supposed to be paying for at the county level and exactly none of the services are being done near my property, except for one, and that one service complains about not having enough money even when they get massive bumps in their budget - no matter what they ask for, when they receive it it's not enough for them to fulfill their obligations. Taxation in general - no I think it's necessary one way or another for our society. But I think the vast majority of it is wasted without enough accountability or integrity. But I guess I can always vote against the people doing, right? Yeah that's working great. But it's just justified with, "but we have to have roads."

I wonder what would happen if we allowed everyone paying taxes to dedicate a small percentage to a field they feel is important and underpaid, e.g. by choosing a category like education, road infrastructure, social services, military... for planning reasons this could be done a year in advance.

Would that make people feel more agency and ownership in their nation? Or would it produce (small) chaos?

Wouldn't change my feelings much because it doesn't do anything to address my current problems with the system. I would bet the same amount I pay in taxes that all it would do is increase the demand for money by agencies without any increase in accountability or thriftiness.

The one rule that annoys me the most in local tax spenders is how you cannot give money back to the state that you don't need that year, because then you will get less next year as well since obviously you didn't need it. At the end of the year you can see employees spend money on the most ridiculous things since they have to spend it all. At this point I think it's because the money is not meant for their task at all but rather to stimulate the (local?) economy, and that is not done by saving.

I'm not sure how the rules would have to be changed to allow for giving money back (and use it to pay for state debt, but that is probably not politically wished for either), since there most probably would be side effects. Still, this rule.. (Germany, but I've heard about others as well)

Does somebody know why this rule exists? At some point I complained to a state minister at some election thing, but I think he was too drunk to understand since he kept saying he didn't know what I was talking about and wanted to know who is doing this thing.

Okay, I'll agree that you didn't say taxation is theft if you will agree that I didn't say that roads are a justification for higher taxes.

The context of my comment about roads that you jumped on was that I was responding to a poster who was saying taxation is theft.

Yes, the parent comment was equally stupid. Parent comment doesn't wage the longest war in US history without ever voting on whether or not to wage it, make me pay for it, and then blame roads.

I think if you actually listened to the people making the roads argument instead of reacting to what you incorrectly think people are saying, you'd discover that most of them (myself included) oppose US military spending.

EDIT: Given the things you are complaining about, it seems like we're fairly in agreement about how we would like tax spending to be allocated.

It seems like you believe that removing/reducing taxes is more realistic than reallocating spending. It's a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I can see how this is choosing a realistic imperfect solution over an unrealistic perfect one.

In fact, I'd agree with you if you could separate the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation, but unfortunately, you can't. Taxation isn't actually strongly correlated with spending in the US. Historically, conservatives have decreased taxes while increasing spending (largely on the military). If you vote for people who run on a platform of decreasing spending, what you end up with historically in the US is people who cut a few token programs (welfare, for example) and pump far more money into the military than was saved by their cuts, increasing the national debt. The result is that by pushing for tax cuts you actually exacerbate the allocation problems you've pointed out.

>> the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation

Yeah and I think that mismatch is exactly how it's gotten so bad. How is it that we still have "the war", undeclared, after 16+ years? It's because everything is now enabled through whether or not there's a budget for it, and you can pretty much accept the budget or shut down the government, and everyone keeps choosing to just accept the budget and not hold their party responsible for promising shit again.