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Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads. These are not naturally forming, they are planned and maintained by people doing a job who need to be compensated.

The problem with taxes is who is taxed. If only a few hundred families control a majority of the wealth, why are you paying taxes? They need to be taxed back down to the quality of life that we live.

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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads.

They are not contributing to anything. Taxation is fully decoupled from public spending, which is why the US can issue $1.8T in new Treasury bonds in a year to no noticeable effect.

Public utilities (such that exist - most of them have been privatized in everything but name) operate on the expectation that the staff providing engineering expertise and materials can enjoy a reasonably comfortable quality of life. Setting aside that most utilities bill separately from state and local taxation (I pay a monthly water bill and a gas tax per gallon to fund these amenities), they are provided at an extraordinary mark-up that the actual staff don’t get to enjoy. As a case in point, Houston waste removal services have been chipped away at since COVID, with staff working longer hours for lower pay using outdated equipment. The mayor has outsourced more and more of the work to a private contractor owned by one of his mega-donor friends. What money is collected via property taxes goes first into the profits of the private contracting agencies, then to their administrators, and only at last to trickle down on the actual laborers collecting the trash.

Meanwhile, the housing and personal transport and groceries and other lifestyle amenities required by the waste management workers is… once again outsourced to the private sector, where owners take their cut first and labor gets the dredges. The end result is a working class mired deeper and deeper into debt, while the landed class grows fatter and richer.

This isn’t taxation paying for labor or materials. This is taxation paid out as a rent to landlords and cronies.

The problem with taxes is who is taxed.

That’s a system functioning as intended. Taxation is rent-seeking at the governmental scale. You don’t tax your aristocrats, because they’re supposed to be the recipients of the labor surplus. You tax the laborers, because you need a legalized mechanism for extracting any surplus remaining with them, in order to redistribute it to your aristocratic peers.

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