Property exists even in stateless societies
If it's a "buy-in" to a system people should have a way to "buy out" as well, which of course doesn't happen, because there never was any "buy-in", it was "pay us your wages or we'll hunt you down". Slaves could buy their own freedom in Rome and other places, so why can't "free" people under taxation?
Property rights should rank far lower than human rights. So if you want to collect taxes, go after property instead of after people. But it is the property owning class who runs the two-sided coin of capitalism/socialism, so good luck on that.
And the above is a trade-off, the state polices & punishes murder and theft etc, with an aim of reducing it overall - so you are less likely to be murdered or stolen from.
Then this central mechanism needs paying for. Tax is simply a way of paying for it - and it's not voluntary to stop free-riders.
The reality is you need government & laws when people start living in complex societies where people are no longer self-sufficient, but rely on a complex web of interactions.
Laws are there to arbitrate between people - if you live on a homestead in the mountains they may seem unnecessary - if you live in a big city, where even essentials like food and water depend on a complex web of interactions - they are essential.
Depends on the country but normally your success benefitted from things like your and your employees's education, police, infrastructure etc.
Taxes are a way to pay back. The amount is debatable not the existence as such.
The whole point of centralised laws is it's much more efficient than negotiating with everyone you meet as to whether they will k!ll you and/or take or stuff or not.
The scale of interactions in modern societies requires simplification of the management of those interactions - laws and enforcement of - what's allow or not is decided once, not every interaction.
BTW without governments opayed through taxes things like officious intermedler doctrine wouldn't exist instead you get the good old nice-place-you-got-there-be-a-shame-if-anything-happened-to-it doctrine.
Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it
So he is saying he hasn't asked for the government services but is been forced to pay for them. The obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules - you can't pick and choose.
That's such nonsense though, since as an individual you have virtually no impact on anything unless you were born into extreme wealth. No government that I'm aware of operates hypothecation (where you can specify what your taxes get used for), and voting for representatives based on policy commitments is crude, unreliable, and too slow to be adequately responsive. Nobody in the private sector has a job where they are only subject to performance review every 2/4/6 years.
In the US, few people truly support the roughly $1 trillion annual cost of 'defense' and nobody thinks it's efficiently allocated, but any proposals to significantly cut that sum are political suicide so it's never going to happen. Much of our current political angst stems from people's intuitive awareness that their taxes are a real fact of life whereas their influence on the political process is largely notional.
I'd argue that the democratic ties between the people and the actions of the government in the US are extremely fragile - money is more important than people now in the US electoral system.
Another American disease is to then extrapolate that malaise and assume the rest of the world is in a similar position.
The solution isn't to dissolve society - that removes the only mechanism ( government ) that the majority have to control the powerful, further entrenching the power of the rich.
The solution is to take money out of US politics and get it working again for the majority,
Imagine without asking you someone cleaned your car ,while you were shopping, and then demanded payment.
They're comparing the services provided by taxes to this.
It is silly. None of us consented to our parents / guardians raising us.. but for better or worse they did.
The real world tends not to be full of absolutes. It's unhelpfully reductive to go from "property is a right" to "taxation is theft".