That would apply if governments were simply bandits providing nothing of value.

Instead, governments provide many extremely valuable services. So, people rightly complain about free riders benefiting from the services which other taxpayers need to pay for without chipping in.

No, it applies whether governments provide perfect value for money, zero value for money, or something in between. The question isn't how it's spent.

The question is: should we be of the mindset that companies that obey the rules as written are somehow not obeying the "real" rules, rather than putting the fault on the rule writers, whose only purpose is to write good rules, and who are part of the "extremely valuable services" we all pay for?

How much money is spent is ultimately how much money needs to be collected in taxes in one form or another. There is no way to reduce taxes on X without eliminating some spending or increasing taxes elsewhere. Perhaps you’re fine eliminating GPS to reduce your taxes, but in general people don’t want to shut that down etc.

In the end it’s not a question of obeying the rules it’s a question of individuals or companies writing those rules to favor themselves and others objecting to those rules.

Well, no, unless you think money is spent efficiently. And also no, in that money is also borrowed, and the currency is also inflated, so the government has more unit currency to spend. If taxes balanced spending, without taxes just being exorbitant personal effort-destroying monsters, then there'd be no debate.

But anyway. That still is irrelevant to this point, which is that writing down rules is the easy bit, and creating value year on year is the hard bit. Blame the people who get free money to write rules that get them money if there are loopholes. Don't blame the people actually working to make them that free money.

Inflation is a form of taxation, everyone with that currency loses value. Thus when you borrow below the inflation rate the difference is “paid off” by taxing people.

Borrowing isn’t free money, it’s in fact more expensive than taxing people directly.

> That still is irrelevant to this point, which is that writing down rules is the easy bit, and creating value year on year is the hard bit.

Hardly, making money from investments isn’t difficult and has some of the largest tax breaks built in. As someone that’s inherited money I can say theirs nothing inherently virtuous or difficult about it and wow it’s tax free!

But hey I am glad you’re working extra hard so I can lazy around as much as I feel like it.

> Hardly, making money from investments isn’t difficult

You might be the world's best trader if you're saying that, but you still can't just reach into companies' bank accounts and take their money. You take on the large risk of losing money when you invest.

Don’t worry, if I lose money I get a tax break! Because you rubes must want to work extra hard to ensure I don’t have to, even if it’s easy enough to make money literal random number generators work.

Also, individual investors don’t generally need to raid companies they can simply sell to other investors. But collectively or with a large enough percentage of the stock we can dissolve the company and sell off its assets. This tends to happen if the stock price falls so far as to make plundering the company look appealing. See: Corporate raiding etc

Of course you get a tax "break" - the rules aren't so obscene that the rule-writers make money on your losses. If you think losing so much money you pay no tax is a good outcome for you, that's fine. Would we all have such a positive attitude to our losses.

Other than that, I'm struggling to make out what you're saying. It once again doesn't seem related to what I'm saying.

The fact is that the government, like a bandit, says to a person: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon them from the road side, and, holding a pistol to their head, proceed to rifle their pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

The bandit takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes people’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travelers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

--Lysander Spooner

(on libertrarians) House cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appeciate or understand.

-- John Spaulding

Cats are quite capable of subsisting on squirrels and birds. But if you put cat food on a plate, they do what's easier.

The question is, does "free" stuff justify its true cost? How many people would willingly pay the amount they currently pay to Raytheon or upper middle class retirees with plenty of savings, if they actually had a choice?

Spending isn’t just individual choices it’s a tradeoff. I can guarantee you want a lot of government spending that I would be happy to cut. If I argue for canceling all weather satellite funding you can bet many would object and so it goes.

I personally think the CIA, NSA etc are a waste of funds let’s slash funding by 90% and see what happens. But that doesn’t mean everyone else agrees with what I think is worth funding.

But that's kind of the point, isn't it? If all the people who want GPS didn't have to pay for bridges they don't want (and war machines and corporate welfare) then they'd have enough money to pay for GPS even if they were the only ones paying, and vice versa. You can still have GPS and bridges because they each have a set of people who value them at more than their cost.

Whereas if the only people who want corn subsidies are the people receiving them and not the people paying for them, you wouldn't have them anymore.

It’s a more complicated problem because if you get rid of say prisons and the police you don’t get groups of individuals privately funding such things. It’s a free rider problem where as can be demonstrated around the world the only known solution is collective taxation.

If you want GPS and are happy to pay for it then why should I pay if I can get it for free without paying? With GPS the idea of encrypting the data might work, but that doesn’t work for say vaccination were public safety results from individual choices.

Governments don't actually solve the free rider problem though. Taxpayers in the US pay for GPS and then everybody gets it all over the world; why should they pay anything when they can get it for free? The same goes for vaccine research and things like that; once it exists everybody gets it even if only one country was to pay for it.

But it still works because people can see that they're better off funding something that benefits them even if it also benefits someone who didn't pay, and so it is whether it's a government or not.

Now, sometimes a government might be more efficient at these things. Having people pay for GPS might be one way to get it, but then you have to collect money from everyone, which has administrative costs, and people who can't afford it can't use it even though there is no incremental cost in providing it to them.

But when you weigh that against the colossal amount of waste and violence governments commit in the process, the math doesn't look good. And you can get the same level of efficiency from a nonprofit that provides the service for free to the public, if the public wants it enough to donate to it. Which people would have more money to do if they weren't paying taxes to fund the maintenance of empty government buildings etc.

People outside the US using GPS isn’t a free rider problem, that use is at the mercy of the US government which is inherently valuable.

Do you think the US would vote for or against the UN to making a global competitor?

There already are GPS alternatives. China and Russia both operate their own, either of which can also be used by anyone for free. But nobody really uses them because the US doesn't actually use "selective availability" anymore, has promised never to use it again, and the modern satellites don't even support it:

https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/

You can find a list of good reasons why they should never want to do this, but one of the big ones is that if they ever actually did they could only do it once, because then no one would trust them not to anymore and would start including hardware support for the alternative systems in case it isn't available.

But that isn't really the point. The relevant issue is that the US taxpayer pays for GPS and then the people of Italy and Australia and Brazil get it for free. Even if GPS had been an exception with some strategic defense purpose, how does that explain e.g. funding for cancer research?

> People outside the US using GPS isn’t a free rider problem, that use is at the mercy of the US government which is inherently valuable.

I think this is a really cynical take. A government opens up a service that's benefitted billions for 50 years and you think it's so the US gets them "hooked"? They use it because it gives them value, and they (we) didn't have to pay for that value at all.