Which I mean, my wife believes that the government using the threat of violence to collect taxes is immoral, unethical, and that all transactions between all individuals should be voluntary and nonviolent. Which in terms of popular discourse, is very "extreme". She was thinking about running for local public office an a platform of "the government will not take away your propery for failure to pay taxes" which a surprising number of local people on Facebook supported. She's been going to Meetups and having people say "oh yeah I saw your meme, the government sucks, keep it up!" She bugs local politicans on Facebook, their ads keep popping up in her feed, so she'll ask them things like "do you think it's moral to seize someone's property when they can't pay their taxes?" which of course gets bullshit nonanswers from politicians. Nobody wants to say "I think it's moral to seize someone's house because they're behind on taxes".
An authoritarian government wouldn't like someone like my wife, and they certainly wouldn't want her getting likes on Facebook. After all, what if she DOES run for office? What if she wins? What if other people like her win?
And since neither involves paying directly for a government service, there's nothing the government could deny in the absence of payment.
Income taxes are no more voluntary than consumption taxes.
> corporations (already masters at tax avoidance under coercive taxation) would never opt in
130 countries have already backed a global corporation tax rate.
> nor would consumers volunteer to pay more for goods and services when they could simply pay less.
They already do. A gallon of gas is $1.8 in Malaysia, $3.5 in America, and over $8 in the Netherlands.
> And since neither involves paying directly for a government service, there's nothing the government could deny in the absence of payment.
The good/service one is purchasing is the incentive itself.
Yes, that was my point. Replacing income taxes with corporate and consumption taxes in a voluntary taxation system doesn't make sense, as there's no incentive to volunteer to pay any of that.
>130 countries have already backed a global corporation tax rate.
130 governments may have backed a global corporation tax rate, but that's still coercion of taxes by threat of violence. No corporations have voluntarily agreed to anything of the sort.
>A gallon of gas is $1.8 in Malaysia, $3.5 in America, and over $8 in the Netherlands.
Those prices are set by gas companies and taxation, consumers didn't agree to those prices, and they certainly didn't agree to the taxes. I never signed a contract agreeing to gas for $3.50 a gallon.
>The good/service one is purchasing is the incentive itself.
But the government isn't providing either, a private business is. And as the tax is voluntary, that business has no incentive to deny customers who opt out because those taxes doesn't affect revenue. Rather, any business that would deny service for that reason would find itself quickly devoid of customers.
Give people a choice, and they'll only pay for what benefits them personally. People won't pay for schools to educate other people's children, or schools that teach a curriculum with which they disagree. They won't pay for libraries whose books they don't read, or for parks, because homeless people hang out there. People will just buy smoke detectors and not fund the fire department. People won't fund the police, they'll just buy insurance or keep a gun under their pillow. They won't pay to fix the roads unless they're inconvenienced by a pothole. And welfare and other social programs would just vanish altogether. Most people would refuse to pay any taxes at all to a government run by a political party they didn't vote for.
There's a reason taxes are collected at the point of a gun - you can't trust public altruism to fund a modern state.