In my opinion, your outrage is misplaced.
Don't hate the other players, hate the game that coerce you into paying taxes (i.e punish you) because you have partaken in a peaceful and voluntary exchange with another person.
Don't hate the other players, hate the game that coerce you into paying taxes (i.e punish you) because you have partaken in a peaceful and voluntary exchange with another person.
However if you want to use the Internet, which was subsidized by and developed using research by U.S. and E.U. governments then my counter argument would be that you need to pay the toll of the IRS or whatever other government you reside within.
If you want to start your own nation somewhere and build your own inter-continental communication network then by all means feel free to fund that effort by whatever you deem necessary to achieve that end.
Taxes are needed, however begrudgingly, to fund a government which maintains a civilized and peaceful exchange of commerce. There are no examples I'm aware of where a lawless no-mans-land has resulted in anything more than a region dominated by warlords.
> However if you want to use the Internet, which was subsidized by and developed using research by U.S. and E.U. governments then my counter argument would be that you need to pay the toll of the IRS or whatever other government you reside within.
For this matter, how will you travel to meet the other person? Will you take a taxpayer-funded road? Will you take a plane monitored by taxpayer-funded air traffic controllers?
And how do you know the other person won't just shoot you and take your currency? Maybe it's because they're worried that the taxpayer-funded police and public prosecutors will go after them if they do that.
If you want to take your labor off the farm, so to speak, then go ahead. But you're going to have a very difficult time enjoying as much fruit from your labor your only currency is your own time, with no common economic structure.
There are lots of public goods that are much more heavily subsidized; gas, electric, water, law enforcement, fire, military...
There are ample examples of robust, thriving, civilizations that had alternative monetary systems before the Private Finance Oligarchy ate the world.
To give you some prep, the next question I'm going to ask is what the quality of life was like for the average individual in those civilizations, including the usual metrics: healthcare, access to food, access to running water, etc.
One step further, if you provide answers for these questions, I'm going to happily show you why it's extremely difficult to extract the incentives for developing these quality of life improvements from capitalism without designing an economic system that looks like it.
Then I suppose you and I will debate whether or not capitalism is perfect, which will be a red herring, because that was never really the point.
Deal?
I think you are making a reasonable assumption that theoretical systems that allow for concentration of capital result in greater technological advancement than theoretical systems that tend to diffuse capital. But the real world is complex and messy. Living people sometimes behave in ways that are surprising to the economist.
It is very difficult to "design an economic system". You either have to devise an incremental path to it from the old system, or march people to it under the threat of death. If you're really going to ask someone to compare historic civilizations with the modern global civilization we have now, you're probably going to need to make some adjustments in order for that to be a fair comparison, instead of one implicitly biased to your own point of view.
I'm not certain it is even possible to do that for a comparison between a pre-industrial civilization and a post-industrial civilization. What we can say for sure is that it hasn't always been this way and therefore it doesn't always need to be as it is now.
If you want to go make a million dollars, more power to you, but you also need to pay your fair share like everyone else.