[WS:] You are joking, right? In case, you do not, consider this: charity accounts for about 1% of the GDP in the US and much less in EU countries. Government social spending accounts for about 16% of the GDP and about 25-28% in EU.
Sandy: 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.
[WS:] I do not know many places where governments take money at a gun point but were no government exist (e.g. Somalia) taking money at a gun pojint by various war lords occurs daily. Can you provide any counterexamples?
As far as I know, taxes are a form of payment for public goods, and such good have much larger benefits to the working and middle class and those not so well off than to the rich. Public goods offer at least three major advantages over private arrangements: they are a matter of right, they are publically controlled, and they lower th eper unit (marginal) price due to the economy of scale. Private contracts can never match these advantages, but they offer the providers of these contracts much dreater power over consumers by being able to deny the contract, and not providing a a full disclosure.
So if I were concerned about jackbooted thugs taking away my money at a gunpoint, or getting services when I need them and at the price that I can afford, I would pray for a strong government. If, however, I were aspiring to be one of such jackbooted thugs, or perhaps shysters getting rich by moving around other people's money, I would see government as my enemy. It is really that simple.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------
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