Aside from military protection, that is a list of things largely irrelevant to people who live in rural areas. It's money to be confiscated from them and used to prop up societies to which they have little to no connection.
Roads alone are very expensive, over a million bucks per mile in rural areas. Wyoming has 33,000 miles of road serving a population of 550k. That works out to at least $60k per person in just to build the roads, never mind maintaining them. And not having these roads means higher transportation costs, which translate to more money spent on goods and more profit being lost to transporting sales.
There are plenty of countries in the world without individual taxes, they just also happen to be places most people don't want to live.
This is a commonly repeated myth, but is not usually true. Road costs are far lower than often claimed. A 2-lane asphalt road construction costs about $800k on average and lasts approximately 30 years with proper maintenance. (Using MDOT numbers, since that's what I happen to have on hand).
In Wyoming, this works out to $1,600 per person per year ($133/month/person). But that assumes every single road in Wyoming is paved -- they aren't. I don't know the accuracy of this, but the University of Wyoming claims only 20% of a county's roads are paved in the state, on average, so real costs are probably much lower.
In states with any significant city whatsoever, the costs drop dramatically. Michigan, for example, has 120,256 miles of road serving 9.9 million people, 75% of which are rural. That's a total road cost of about $360 per person per year ($30/person/month).
[0] https://osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2015/fed_budget_fy201...
I can't find a more recent pre-compiled source, and too lazy to run the numbers myself. I doubt it has changed significantly enough to make the
only when competing against imports from defacto slaves in other countries..
There is some level of self-sustainment but it's a myth how 'independent' people really are.
They might be detached from the federal side of things but they still also have to interact at a state level.
Only off-the-grid homesteaders can make any credible claim to having no connection to society at large, but if they get sick, they better be honest with themselves and just die at home instead of going to get healthcare from a system they elected not to contribute to.
You go really far down the civilizational chain if you remove these mechanisms. Almost all the way down to primitivism.
Whose definition of "good" are we using? Clearly not mine, as my definition of "good" demands consent.
And is it hypocritical to live in the West and take advantage of all the benefits it gained from centuries of imperialism and exploitation, while criticizing that behavior?
I'm not against taxation, but that's some BS logic.
Unless you want to argue about people paying more in taxes than they (feel they) get in benefits. In which case, well, the most rabid anti-tax people generally are getting far more benefits than they pay for (and are busily re-rigging the tax system to tilt even more in their favor).
If the claim was that anti-tax people demand both not paying tax and that others do, then I wouldn't have posted. Although I'd say that just selfish, not hypocritical.
But that is exactly it. They want all the benefits of living in a modern civilized society, but they don't want to pay their share of keeping that society going.
Also, the claim that it's all hypocrisy reminds me of this bit from the TAL episode "What Kind of Country":
Jan Martin: And a gentleman came up to me and actually thanked me for the adopt a street light program. He had just written a check to the city for $300 to turn all the street lights back on in his neighborhood. And I did remind him that for $200 if he had supported the tax initiative, we could have had not only streetlights, but parks and firemen and swimming pools and community centers. That by combining our resources, we as a community can actually accomplish more than we as individuals.
Robert Smith: And he said?
Jan Martin: He said he would never support a tax increase.
I think the ideas of anti-taxation is often hypocritical, too often you see people critize tax cuts that do not serve their other beliefs. Mind you, this is not an argument against tax cuts, I just think anti taxation is an pipedream.