The U.S. government has supported taxation from day 1, including for the purposes of funding collective welfare, e.g. collective self-defense. Current citizens pay for the democratic decisions of past generations all the time. Even if you don't drive, you pay taxes to support road and bridge maintenance. This is not "indentured servitude". It is how a democratic society functions.
How much do we owe? Answer: it is determined through a democratic decision-making process that weighs costs and benefits to our society.
Case in point: This very forum would likely not exist without the aforementioned expansion of government. DARPA and government funding for high-tech research to the tune of billions of dollars has been instrumental in the birth and evolution of Silicon Valley, and continues today (e.g. Siri, self-driving cars).
If anything I think your "many other networks" example reinforces the point. The private sector left to its own devices came up with tons of incompatible small networks all vying to be the juggernaut.
The government, when faced with much larger problems than growing market share, instead invested considerable resources into solving a problem in a way that could handle the needs of a large national government, and then later invested more resources into making that internet a public good.
Even if the government hadn't developed its own internet protocols (and standardized on a notional private sector one), the government would likely still have been instrumental in expanding the use of some other standard. E.g. Eisenhower didn't invent the road, but his Administration sure did ensure a lot of them got built.
And they also built gateways so they could interface with each other. The pressure to connect them together was enormous.
For another example, Unicode isn't a government standard, and has replaced the various earlier competing protocols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#History
The idea that the private sector won't standardize has plenty of counterexamples. Ethernet, for another.
Just like if the Wright Bros had not invented the airplane in 1903, someone else would have probably within 5 years. We'd still be flying today.
I suspect that the number of inventions that would not inevitably have happened once the preconditions were in place is very small.
After all, as I mentioned previously, having worked extensively with computers before the internet, the first thing someone with two computers tries to do is hook them together.
Hell, I even did my own hardware and software to transfer files from my LSI-11 to a PC over a wire. The government couldn't have stopped an internet workalike from forming if it tried.
This country was very specifically founded NOT as a democracy, for the very reason elucidated above. If the mob wants to vote your rights away, they should not be able to.
Self-defense and transfer payments from one individual to another (i.e., welfare) are different issues fundamentally. We authorize the government to solve the problem of coordination---in terms of defense, we don't want a bunch of private militaries roving around the countryside. At the heart of this is the issue of rights protection: if one man steals from another, his rights have been violated and government must act in response.
However, if the issue is whether a man has a claim on another man's property simple because he "needs" it, this is not sufficient justification for him to take it by force. Indeed, most people would call this "theft". Why is it different if the thug steals a dollar in dark alley from you or if a government coerces the same action at the point of a gun? Because a majority have voted for it?
Taxes are the bill you pay for living in a place where the government provides some services.
When I hear someone say "taxation is theft," I think, what a freeloader.
Even if we narrowly focus on a particular system of "private property right protection", which was certainly not the exclusive focus of the founding fathers -- who also advocated slavery and were extremely protectionist -- that nonetheless requires the enthusiastic embracement of the majority enforcing its will upon the minority at the point of a gun.
Only men? I always find it amusing when this kind of libertarian rhetoric forgets that women exist.
And if you want to talk about who is protecting the freedom of individuals, keep in mind that the US banned slavery considerably later than it's contemporaries. You talk of a 'gargantuan rights-violating welfare state' while at the same time lionising a state that was quite happy to literally enslave people. Not figuratively or rhetorically, but literally enslave people.
Can you read back my comments? When did I lionize the institution of slavery? The Founders got most things right philosophically, and fell short on some of the practical implementation. Eventually the Civil War rectified this contradiction.
When did I lionize the institution of slavery?
You didn't lionise the institution of slavery, but you were lionising people that made a system that supposedly was all about individual rights but was at the same time supporting slavery.
You don't get to talk about how awesome the Founding Fathers were about the rights of individuals if you get to hand-wave away the multitudes of individuals whom they had no problems putting in chains. I mean, you even specified "absent coercion" about a society with legal industrial-scale slavery!
Edit: to be clearer, the Founding Father's philosophy quite happily allowed for slavery in practice. Perhaps you shouldn't talk of it in such reverent tones - the 'welfare state' you complain of is clearly better at being fair to all individuals, not just the blessed ones that are pre-approved.
Insofar as the statement is even remotely arguably accurate as a statement of history, it would have to be about only men.
Even then, its still more mythology than reality.
Incidentally, the U.S. government was set up in such a way where men were not beholden to others, but were equals, trading value for value with each other absent coercion. A strong but limited government was instituted to protect individual rights---to protect us against internal and external threats with retaliatory force.
The expansion of the government over the last 100 years has nothing to do with the protection of individual rights and the original intention of Founders (who were greatly influenced by Locke). The "social contract" is a way for some individuals to justify the abrogation of protecting the freedom of individuals in favor of a gargantuan rights-violating welfare state.
Finally, what is the objective measure of how much an individual owes? Do they owe 50% of their time? 70%? To whom specifically do they owe this? How does one come to these conclusions in an objective manner?