Hate is a strong word - perhaps these voters you speak of simply don't feel there is a very strong correlation between amount of taxes/fees paid, and services rendered.
Hating on the general concept of taxes isn't very productive but people are quite unhappy about the details. Politics involves painful compromises and tax is one of the pointy ends of politics.
I'd hazard that taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose - because otherwise presumably said taxpayer would already be paying for the service.
Sorry, the first half of your sentence is too broad for the rest of it to possibly be true.
Logically speaking, the assertion that 50%+ of taxes are driven by the same motivation seems impossible. Taxation is such a generic mechanism at work in so many different places, your assertion seems like a non-starter to me.
Did you intend to make such a strong claim?
The intent was quite different, I didn't see a reading of that sentence that involved motivation but now that it has been pointed out I can see that it is the most obvious one. My intent was more about the outcomes of a tax but that wasn't expressed.
What I wanted to say was something more like "No political decision has perfect support, and many cause stark divisions. But taxpayers financially support all the decisions taken and they will be vehemently opposed to some of the things they fund".
All of the competency arguments aside, this smacks of a "the free market will solve it" argument. These arguments are tiresome because the one example raised for the best evidence of this is the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
People don't generally pay for things that are in their core competencies. A very common reason to pay someone else to do something is because the person with money doesn't know how to get the result they want.
> the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
You might want to pass that on to the migrants of the world. Judging by total migration the United States are possibly most attractive destination available. Its migration intake isn't shabby when looked at as a rate either. That dumpster fire is a powerful attractor.
And even then you've missed the argument. I didn't say taxes were a bad thing. I said that people often have very strong principled objections to what their taxes are used for.
> taxes are usually raised to force people to support ideas that the individual taxpayers vehemently oppose
This is wrong, because they are raised to support a country and most of that (hence the "usual" qualifier) is to support things people might not know they need. Your response to this is apparently that people do pay for things they don't know they need (or don't understand are necessary), but you fail to tell the reader why. Instead you reiterate that you are convinced they'll definitely pay for them.
That point isn't reasonable. There can't be a division where people know what they want when they vote but not when they spend money. I suppose there could be in theory, but a system that encourages that that would generally be called 'corrupt government' and the actors involved 'lying politicians' where the people who get voted in do things that the individual voters vehemently oppose.
Voting someone in to office is a broadly similar decision to going out and buying something. Individuals in their capacity as voters are not that different from individuals in their capacity as buyers.
Not that the amount of taxes paid ever stopped a government from trying borrow and spend way more than that.
Government, taxes, and private industry are all tools of civilization. Tools are imperfect and the human managers & users are imperfect. One has to monitor all of them to keep them in decent working order. They won't just automatically run in an optimum mode if citizens don't keep a critical eye on them all.
The only things a government can run out of are faith in the future and internal and external trust. When either or both of those disappear, human animals panic and the economy stops working.
Private enclosure of capital - which is equivalent to private enclosure of political and economic power - is far more likely to create that sort of breakdown than high taxes and generous public spending. (Effective - non-corrupt - public spending being equivalent to policy decisions that broaden and diffuse political power rather than concentrating it.)
Effective generous public spending is actually a political negative feedback mechanism that damps wild oscillations in confidence, seeds future investment, and enhances political stability.
Laws are the same way: members of civilization have to mutually agree on how to create and follow the laws for them to "work".
Civilization is the Mother of All Handshakes. If a large enough percentage of the population disagrees with the "agreements", anarchy happens.
Modern technology and civilization are both inherently driven by standards: both written and de-facto.
Governments frequently consume more resources than they can purchase with the taxes they collect.
Yes, they could just print all the money they could ever need. And when they do, inflation runs wild. Then a government cannot borrow in its own currency because no one will trust it. Or it must pay a high rate.
The US government is in a unique situation. It's been able to print much more than a government normally could because it is the most trusted reserve currency in a rapidly globalizing world. Trillions of dollars are held overseas. And if the dollar loses that role, you will see a lot of inflation as those dollars return to the US. Even if it doesn't lose that role and the world just stops taking additional dollars, the US would have to print less to keep the same rate of inflation.
Most governments don't fall into this category. And no country is in this category forever.
A country's currency is really just another form of debt. And while it may never run out, the more it prints, the more it declines in value. It's not debt people can collect on, but the law of supply and demand will certainly collect on this debt.
And it's also a tax, a tax on savings. And the country could remove dollars from circulation, thereby reducing this debt and reversing the decline in the value of savings.