Electile Dysfunction (Current students plz look!)

[G.Irish]

Hyperbole, sarcasm, and outright dismissal weakens your position significantly,  Gerald.

You're better than that.

Sorry you feel that way, I'm not trying to be mean-spirited at all.  But like I said, if the premise is that 'taxation is theft', then clearly the antidote is that taxes should be 100% voluntary.  How should taxes work if they're 100% voluntary?  No one seems to answer that.

My perception is that people who are strongly against taxes often have a few main objections:

*My taxes pay for things I don't use
*Taxes are too high
*My taxes pay for things I don't agree with

So for those issues maybe you have an a la carte tax system where you choose what to spend your money.  Some municipalities in the US have actually already tried that.  Don't know how happy people are overall with such a system, but there is some precedent (and burnt down houses to go with it).  The big problem with an a la carte tax system would probably be that it causes big spikes in the cost of some public services if a lot of people opt out, but that would be the market working itself out.  Again, it'd probably be inefficient in its own way, but that's the tradeoff.

Otherwise for the problem of 'my taxes pay for things I don't agree with', that's a problem with elected officials not doing what you want them to do, which comes down to voting.

But if we come back around to 'taxation is theft', as in, 'it is wrong for a government to force me to pay taxes', the only remedy to that is to make taxes optional.  If they're optional, one who chooses not to pay should not get the benefit of taxes.  You shouldn't get the benefit of public infrastructure if you didn't pay.  You should carry the burden of ensuring the safety of every product you use if don't pay for regulatory bodies.  You don't get the police to protect life and property if you didn't pay into the criminal justice system.

So if you want some of the benefits of public goods and services that are very difficult to live without, you have to pay for them.  A society where you can get that stuff without paying is probably not going to work very well.  So maybe instead of saying 'taxation is theft' maybe 'taxation is a necessary evil'.  As a necessary evil you can try to minimize it, but you can't reasonably eliminate it.