The anti-tax crowd is just like the anti-vax crowd. They both want a free ride on the rest of our backs; the anti-vaxers want the benefit of herd immunity, and the anti-taxers want others to pay the cost of living in the modern world.
Anti-tax is about not forcing people to pay for services they may not want. I don't think it's realistic, but your description of them is uncharitable.
In a world where everyone gets hit on the head with a baseball bat once a week, some people are saying "what's with this? Can't we figure out some way of not getting hit by baseball bats every week?" And you're turning that into "I don't want to get hit by a baseball bat, someone else should get hit instead of me".
I'm not sure I lean one way or the other, but that isn't a good analogy. There's no benefit to anybody from a baseball bat to the head. Now, if a certain number of baseball bats to heads is required to appease the gods and increase fertility, health, etc in a majority of the population, you've got a better comparison. Maybe not everybody needs all those benefits, but the options on the table are to let some people opt out, and decrease the benefits globally, or let some people opt out and increase the bat to head frequency for everyone else, force the holdouts to just quit whining and take their bat to the head for the greater good, or maybe see if there's some alternative way to appease the gods and reap their benefits with less head batting.
I agree that those features would make the analogy more accurate wrt taxation, but if that was the only important thing about an analogy, we wouldn't use analogies at all. (And it's quite possible that I shouldn't have used an analogy in this case.)
I don't think those features are particularly relevant to the mistake Frondo was making.
I'm not sure what point the original analogy was meant to make, and I apologize if I missed it.
Frondo claimed that "anti-taxers" were free riders, which models well with the modified analogy as those who opt-out of being hit in the head, at the expense of everyone else, yet still likely benefit, even if only indirectly, from living in a world where others take the hits to achieve the benefits.
Note that I'm not saying Frondo is correct, I was just showing that the analogy given didn't refute his claim in any way I could see.
Personally, I expect most people against taxes fall under my last category of people trying to find another way to get the needed benefits without being hit in the head, or at least want to get more bang for their buck or a more fair distribution of cost/benefit.
Analogies don't refute things, they just make other things easier to understand. My refutation of Frondo's original claim amounts to: "you're just plain wrong". (Anti-taxers are not free riders. They don't want other people to pay for them.) The analogy was: "here's a similar mistake".
> There's no benefit to anybody from a baseball bat to the head.
Sure it is. It's good for the people being employed to operate the baseball bats. It's also good for the people being employed to make the baseball bats.
This can only be accurate for people who want literally $0 to be taken for taxes, in any form, by any level of government... and yet still expect services to be rendered.
I don't know anyone like that, and I suspect they're in a tiny minority.
For my part, I'd consider those taxes to be theft when they are used for purposes other than a strict list of constitutionally mandated purposes. The other things are services I want to neither pay for nor receive.
Some examples: unemployment (ahem, now "Reemployment") tax, social security tax, welfare, domestic spying operations, Medicare/Medicaid, public education, the Affordable Care Act, much of our military spending, corporate bailouts, lots of alphabet agencies' budgets, etc.
Note that it's not freeloading; I don't want anyone to have them paid and/or provided for by government, including myself.
Many, many things exist in the world that don't exist in the constitution; it's a foundational body of law, not the entirety of the law.
As for not wanting something, but still being obligated to pay for it, there many transactions in the world where you have to pay for more than you want; no automaker will sell you a brand-new car with all of the seats missing, and very often when you go to a restaurant, even if you ask for some ingredient to be left out, you still pay full price for the meal.
That some of your taxes go to things you don't like does not mean you are free from paying for them.
The route to changing what your taxes go to is the political arena, not merely claiming that, because you don't like it, they're "theft".
The tax argument aside - my understanding is if the constitution doesn't provide for it, the federal government shouldn't be doing it.
10th amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There are many transactions in the world where people pay for things they didn't specifically want, e.g. buying a car and getting all the seats and safety features, or ordering a meal and paying the full price even if you ask for some ingredient to be omitted.
In none of these cases--paying for a car where you'll take out the seats, paying for a meal where you don't get the mushrooms, paying taxes for government services you don't agree with--is the payment suddenly "theft".
> There are many transactions in the world where people pay for things they didn't specifically want, e.g. buying a car and getting all the seats and safety features, or ordering a meal and paying the full price even if you ask for some ingredient to be omitted.
The difference is consent. People consent to paying for those meals or the car. But nobody ever consented to taxation. That's all part of the "social contract" we're born into.
You're right that initial decision of consent was made for you by someone else--it was made for you by your parents, when you were a child and they had custody of you.
As an adult, you are free to revoke your consent by leaving the country and ceasing to enjoy the benefits its government provides.
(And as for "nobody consented to taxation," I consented, and continue to do so, because I like contributing to the country where I live and where I'm a citizen.)
They couldn't even if they wanted to. E.g. Better social welfare, law enforcement, and education means less crime. Less crime benefits everyone in some way. Perhaps if it were made legal to commit crimes against people who don't pay taxes...
Even then, it would be basically impossible to avoid benefiting in some way without leaving the country altogether. There will always have to be at least some "core" services that everyone has to pay into, but that doesn't mean techlibertarian's idea totally lacks merit. Maybe some things should be partially opt-outable. Maybe people would start to question whether America really needs to spend half of its tax revenue on the military; maybe there would be more pressure to get some of the presently useless (and very expensive) 2.3 million prisoners back into the workforce.
