If all you care about is paying in so you can take out, and to help cover unlucky people until it's your rainy day, you don't need any taxes at all, just insurance.
In practice taxes are used for all sorts of things which you may or may not agree with (e.g. foreign wars), and other things that you may agree with but maybe don't believe tax and government is the most efficient way to provide it.
The blasé assumption that tax == moral is just another form of the left wing assumption that people working for the state have a slight moral superiority over people working in the private sector (and who are therefore tainted by the desire for profit).
For some things, there aren't really any better options than paying taxes. Military spending comes to mind. For others, it's sort of an open question (roads and healthcare are cases where countries frequently strike different balances). For yet others, tax is obviously the wrong solution. Nobody these days thinks governments should be in the steel or coal businesses, except China.
Unfortunately the nature of tax is that it's rather hard to express your views about it outside of general elections.
> In practice taxes are used for all sorts of things which you may or may not agree with (e.g. foreign wars), and other things that you may agree with but maybe don't believe tax and government is the most efficient way to provide it.
So? You can't evade taxes for A but not B -- if you evade taxes, you are actually more likely to hit, say, orphans, than, say, big business or war profiteers.
I can't respond to "may". If you think there is a better way, humor me, though even then I don't see how one should be allowed to "have the cake and eat it", namely profit from the infrastructure upheld in no small part with taxes, but then not pay taxes because there are better ways. Then make business and be a citizen where it's done a better way, or try to change it where you are.
And yes, I'm aware that taxes get spent on all sorts of crappy things, that doesn't invalidate the general idea or the social contract, and just because I think "trying to minimize taxes whenever possible by all means" is always immoral, doesn't mean I think all taxes are moral in all instances.
> The blasé assumption that tax == moral is just another form of the left wing assumption that people working for the state have a slight moral superiority over people working in the private sector
Except I don't have that assumption, so it can't possibly be a form of that. That simply doesn't parse.
Though we could discuss the meaning of "profit". Someone who voluntarily reads stories to children with cancer does profit from that, too, and furthermore they are also considering the profit others have from that. So it's still a "desire for profit". Hey, even Jesus asked "what does it profit a man..", profit in itself apparently not the issue, but rather what profit, and at what costs to whom or at what point down the road. Profit, in my books, isn't just measured in the amount of money or land something nets, but in everything it involved to get there.
What makes you think that if you minimise your tax payments, it's poor little orphans that get hit and not bloated military budgets or overweight bureaucracies? Isn't that just an assumption on your part? How can you know what governments would choose to spend less on, if they had less tax revenue?
Corporations normally do not profit directly from infrastructure provided by governments. The people who make them up benefit from them a lot, but they pay taxes already. The primary infrastructure corporations specifically use a lot is the courts, and arguably, patent/copyright systems. But these are relatively cheap to administer, especially as courts can charge fees and the patent system is actually a profit centre for government (in the USA).
Everything else (roads, schools, health, etc) is all about people, not the abstract groups they sometimes form. We'd still need them even if there were no corporations.
When I said "may or may not agree with", I meant that many things governments do are somewhat controversial. Not that I expected anyone to write an essay on all of them :-)
> What makes you think that if you minimise your tax payments, it's poor little orphans that get hit and not bloated military budgets or overweight bureaucracies? Isn't that just an assumption on your part? How can you know what governments would choose to spend less on, if they had less tax revenue?
Because that's what happens time and time again, from what I can tell when looking for information on that over the news I got to hear for all of my adult life. It has nothing to do with looking into a glass ball.
> Corporations normally do not profit directly from infrastructure provided by governments. The people who make them up benefit from them a lot, but they pay taxes already.
"Not directly", so? Without the people who need the infrastructure to live, there would be no corporations and no customers.
In practice taxes are used for all sorts of things which you may or may not agree with (e.g. foreign wars), and other things that you may agree with but maybe don't believe tax and government is the most efficient way to provide it.
The blasé assumption that tax == moral is just another form of the left wing assumption that people working for the state have a slight moral superiority over people working in the private sector (and who are therefore tainted by the desire for profit).
For some things, there aren't really any better options than paying taxes. Military spending comes to mind. For others, it's sort of an open question (roads and healthcare are cases where countries frequently strike different balances). For yet others, tax is obviously the wrong solution. Nobody these days thinks governments should be in the steel or coal businesses, except China.
Unfortunately the nature of tax is that it's rather hard to express your views about it outside of general elections.