Your charity argument only validates the parent's comment. No healthy society should rely on private charitable as safety net for the less fortunates.
>"No healthy society should rely on private charitable as safety net for the less fortunates."
Why?
Charities are held to account by a very different constituency (the donors), who are in a much more powerful position.
I'm also not sure your assertion that "people will chose to transfer their wealth to those in their own tribe, and not to those outside of it" holds much water. I think donors often give to causes which affect people very different from themselves, and anyway, your state or nation is really just a different sort of tribe. Given some convincing evidence, I might believe that state-welfare programs are more equitable than private charities, but I have not seen such evidence.
"forcibly take money" I assume refers to levying taxes. I think you'll find that governments that don't levy taxes generally produce less liveable societies than those that do.
> "But the Saudi government—a highly autocratic regime—has historically resisted taxing its citizens for a reason: Taxes empower people to demand more from their government, and they can often be a trigger for democratization. “Taxation plays a profound role in the rise of democracy,” Sven Steinmo, a political-science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me."[0]
[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/sa...
My belief is that forcing somebody to do anything against their will is inherently immoral. Taxation is included in that. It's not that simple of course- it's all relative, and sometimes taxation can do enough good to outweigh that morality.
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to shutdown any government service. I can easly say, I don't have kids so I won't support schools. Or I don't like police/firefighters so I won't pay for them. I don't like parks so I won't pay. I drink water so I won't pay.
Any such society wouldn't survive. Either the next generation would simply be taken over by a competent government with an educated workforce and functioning social services. At some point you have to think beyond yourself ask what is needed to keep America alive.
1) in an economic downturn, one would expect charitable givings to decrease due to economic contraction. I think the evidence from the 2008 recession is somewhat mixed on this topic. Most governments, not reliant on personal donations, do not face the same sort of budget issues (which is another debate).
2) Charities have the ability to discriminate. They can choose how to allocate donations in ways that can include or exclude certain segments. This is in some respects true as well for government spending, but once again boils down to the allocation problem.
3) economies of scale. Larger organizations are often less redundant than a group of smaller organizations, reducing overhead.
> My belief is that forcing somebody to do anything against their will is inherently immoral. Taxation is included in that. It's not that simple of course- it's all relative, and sometimes taxation can do enough good to outweigh that morality.
Since you are not fully opposed to taxation, would you accept a taxation scheme for a government program if an independent and well researched study showed that government spend outperformed private programs by 2.5x, 10x, etc.? Or is it more that any issue that could be addressed via private charitable organizations should be off-limits for the government?
Basic education, housing, medical care, and food/water are areas that are so essential that having them be government run makes sense to me. I'd still prefer them to be as-local-as-practical, since I believe that accountability of government is increased the more local government is. I don't want the United Nations running my local elementary school as an extreme example.
I think that allowing for non-profit/charitable causes to exist and to have contributions to them be tax-deductible is still beneficial to society. I don't want the government deciding which churches are worthy of existing (that's problematic on multiple levels) and neither do I want to penalize someone who believes their church provides important enough community services to be worthy of support over someone else who believes that an art museum or the opera is worthy of support (whether that was via-government or via-donations).
There is no amount of government efficiency in supporting churches that would cause me to turn that over to the government.
There is no amount of private efficiency in providing for national defense that would cause me to turn the military over to private interests to run.
What about enforcing traffic laws, or forcing children to attend school?
They're both rhetorical arguments with a core truth, but if you attempt to take them out of rhetoric they're both incredibly silly.
This means the wealthier you are, the more say you have in appropriating what could be government money. If you make millions per year, you can potentially apportion more money than some citizens make in a decade. You effectively have more power in the government than many other citizens who should have the same capacity for change.
It's a form of plutocracy.
Why would my charitable giving give me power in the government?
> the more say you have in appropriating what could be government money.
Everything could be government money, my house could be a government house, my wife could be a government woman, etc.
Just because the government has the power to seize it doesn't mean they should or that it's theirs
I feel like I already outlined this, but it bears repeating. Taxation gives money to the government and the government decides how to spend it. If the government spends it poorly we can vote out those who use it improperly. You can't vote Jeff Bezos out of the country.
> Everything could be government money, my house could be a government house, my wife could be a government woman, etc.
Technically a percentage of you house is claimed by the government through property tax and your wife isn't property and I hope you know that.
Yes, that's exactly what it means, because, as you say it's "their" money. A pretty fundamental part of ownership is deciding what to do with something.
You really think government should be telling people how and where to spend their money?
Nope. And you are free to spend your money how you want. The point missed here is that when it's tax-deductible that money _would_ have been local/state/federal money.
The government already decided you need to return that money back to the community/country. If they give you the power to choose who gets it, they've given you the ability to appropriate government funds.
That isn't true, only a fraction of the money would have been taxed.
And that's exactly the point: We are incentivizing people to give 5 times as much money as taxes would have been.
If that money isn't allocated perfectly, well, there's 5 times as much of it, I think it'll be OK.
> The government ....
The government will never do a perfect job, this way we let people fill in the gaps.
> they've given you the ability to appropriate government funds.
You keep talking as if they deduct the full amount donated from taxes, this is simply not true.