Tax Morality
Apologies for my slow response to the moral sides of the original question and further issues raised by Rainyday, believe it or not I've been putting together my tax forms to get them in before Aug 31!. And that's the first point I must make; I pay my taxes. My contention though is that taxation is actually immoral as I've pointed out in earlier posts.
To deal with Rainyday's first statement that taxes are levied by a cooperative community force: no way. If you don't pay your taxes, look at what happens to you: the authorities come down like a ton of bricks. And it's that fear that they rely on for people to pay their taxes - to me that's cooercion. When I left secondary school (and yes those taxpayers then, including the fella that played by the book but who now is scratching his head at how unfairly the system treated him, financed part of my education) and started work, I never entered into any agreement through discussion let alone written that the government is allowed to take a certain percentage of my pay. The employer immediately deducted it from my wage and that was it - I couldn't touch it or hand it over willingly. That's not cooperative.
It's a bit like the storekeeper taking your money before you get into the store without any prior arrangement.
Then, the storekeeper tells you what to buy with your money he's taken off you. This is what the falsity of the provision of public services is all about. Bureacrats and politicians have an interest in perpetuating this status quo as it empowers them, their egos and their salaries. However, individual and corporate entrepreneurs could provide all of the public services we assume now that the state must provide.
An immediate example is the education system. We already have private schools and lots of people choose to PAY more and send their kids to them.
We have an emerging private road solution in the form of toll roads. People choose to PAY more and take the M50 toll bridge (it's an inefficient solution at the moment, but it's a start).
To be honest, with a bit of thought almost all of the so-called public services could be provided in the best possible way by allowing free market solutions. The pricing signals of these solutions would dictate those that work, survive and thrive, resulting in the BEST possible provision for the public.
The only areas I would concede you may need some form of central bureacracy is in the provision of national defense (but I'm not 100% convinced of this - look at how the Americans employed a vast range of private contractors in the war in Iraq. Couldn't they do the same to protect their borders? and even possibly improve their intelligence services) and in foreign policy (and once again, foreign policy should keep its nose out of private enterpreneurial solutions).
In our "modern" world, we sometimes find ourselves in thrall to the edifice of what's already constructed around us - in that regard we are no more modern than medieval serfs - and we submit to the direct and indirect coercion of systems that are not optimal for our right livelihoods. A choice-derived pricing-signal is morally incontestable, leads to our ultimate prosperity and thwarts political hypocrisy.
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