alt Hacker News>Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at.
Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling.
>This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.
If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Norway has their sovereign fund as a premprive solution in case the country hits a rough path in the future.
>but rather to contain them and minimize the grift
And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
>either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems
Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
> Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market.
Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.
> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.
> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
Agreed entirely.
> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.
And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.