> I don't even discuss tax. I once told a woman that I didn't mind
> paying tax because there was "a woman down the road who is
> a single parent of two teenage boys" who might need help.
Nothing stops you from giving her private charity, or from organising many like you to help many like her. Probably either would be more effective than government help.
Why do you imagine that the coercive powers of tax -- armed pigs empowered to cease bank accounts and so on -- can justifiaby be used to "help" her?
Granted, those powers need to exist. The government must be able to tax, and to enforce taxes, for things like sanitation and national defense. But once it can take money, effectively at gunpoint, for anything it chooses, we're all screwed. For one thing, the crooked slime won't use it to help her; they'll give it, billions at a time, to cronies like crooked bankers.
Granted also, there's a role for law in helping her, holding the father to account, protecting the woman from loonies who want to "stone the slut", et cetera.
-- Sandy Harris, Quanzhou, Fujian, China