Comment by barrkel
18 days ago
The heart of this is what you think tax is.
If you just think it's the government stealing your stuff, then it seems very unfair to have your stuff taxed after you die.
But what tax is, under another lens, is a way to divert the capacity of a state to social ends. Everything from the military to the police to prisons and the justice system is what enables you to live in peace and accumulate stuff in the first place. Those are social goods.
So how do you fund this spending? How do you incentivize other people to protect your house? Well, the solution of tax is they take a little bit of your stuff over time, in a predictable way, according to rules that are pre-agreed and can be changed with consensus.
The really tricky part is that both aspects of taxes are true.
The really really tricky part is when taxes are used to penalize you - for instance used to fund agencies that even actively harass you (ICE recently).
Or go to fund programs that only your political opponents benefit from.
Also, anyone living in the bay area can attest how terrible the roads are for how much tax money clearly gets spent on them.