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And they were all total garbage. Roads were a mess, sometimes paid for by private individuals to suit their own interests. Rich people had better quality roads

And they were all total garbage. Roads were a mess, sometimes paid for by private individuals to suit their own interests. Rich people had better quality roads than poor people, but travel was terrible basically everywhere. Roads were also sometimes built and maintained by the use of slaves and forced labor (corvée) where local courts just ordered people to start digging while letting rich people buy their way out of their obligation, while poor people were stuck serving out their time. Policing often depended partly on volunteers, while once again, rich people routinely hired private police/security/slave patrols and poor people got little protection comparatively. Garbage collection was just people dumping their shit wherever they felt like it, including into water supplies. All the same problems with schools too. Schools were for the rich or the religious, and even when the country saw a need for public schools they were a huge mess. (https://ushistoryscene.com/article/rise-of-public-education/ https://ushistoryscene.com/article/rise-of-public-education/) Taxes gave us organized systems and standards that meant that services like roads and policing and trash collection were more consistent and a little less dependent on how much money you had. Things are so much better now thanks to taxes that I can't imagine anyone wanting to go back to how things were before them.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sneak 3y ago
I believe things are so much better now thanks to technological and social improvements which are orthogonal to, and not caused by, taxation. Your argument seems to be like the pirates and global warming one; correlation is not causation. A steelman argument might be that tax-funded schools and mandated public education caused these things, but ultimately the root cause there would be greater access to education, not the taxes used to fund them. Improving educational outcomes is not dependent on taxes; we use laws to force people to buy automobile insurance and the same could be done with children’s education without the state in the payment loop. Indeed, private schools are routinely better for educational outcomes than the ones funded by taxes. By this logic (that taxation is the basis for the progress in society) one should see greater technological and social advances and quality of life with increased taxation and more centralized standardization, but we don’t. Instead we got a forever drone war and the military-industrial complex. For every GPS or space shuttle or NIST, there is also an Iraq or Vietnam or Afghanistan.
- autoexec 3y ago
  It doesn't matter how advanced police cars and police training have become over the years if poor people don't have access to their protection. Without taxes, the poor would still get nothing and the rich would still get as much technologically advanced protection as they can afford. Schools have computers today, but even if they'd had chromebooks in the early 1900s, schools would still have been for the elite and the poor would still have been mostly uneducated. Increased taxation absolutely leads to greater technological and social advances and quality of life but only to the extent that those taxes are spent well and only up to a certain point. There's a point of diminishing returns for everything after all. The nice thing about taxes is that we're supposed to be able to have some say in how they're spent, in order to make sure that spending is reasonable. It's a failure of our democracy that we don't have a better handle on massive wastes of spending (like Vietnam or Afghanistan), but not a failure of the very concept of taxation. Taxes are amazing, but the lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability is a real problem. Thankfully it's also one we have the power to fix (and if we don't, we'll need to accept that we have a very different form of government than we tell ourselves we've got)
  - sneak 3y ago
    Even with perfect control over allocation, I still disagree with the philosophical concept of taxation because it is done nonconsensually under threat of force. There is no use of tax money that justifies institutionalized armed robbery, it is morally indefensible to violate consent using the threat of violence. You could tax everyone only $1 and use it exclusively for neonatal care and it would still be morally repugnant. If taxes truly represent the will of the people, and people truly believe they are good, they would pay them even if not placed at gunpoint. “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to buy something he does not want simply because you think it would be good for him.” —Heinlein It seems to me that most of your arguments bring up wealth inequality. At that point, why bother with income taxes? Wouldn’t a simple wealth tax on assets over some threshold address the inequality more directly? If wealth redistribution is the goal, why should non-wealthy people pay any taxes?
    - 3y ago
SamReidHughes 3y ago
Everything you're talking about has nothing to do with federal taxation.
oceanplexian 3y ago
I don’t know how much stock I’d put in roads before the automobile was popularized, however the transcontinental railroad, the most impressive piece of transportation infrastructure in the world at the time, was built without Federal income taxes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sneak 3y ago

I believe things are so much better now thanks to technological and social improvements which are orthogonal to, and not caused by, taxation. Your argument seems to be like the pirates and global warming one; correlation is not causation. A steelman argument might be that tax-funded schools and mandated public education caused these things, but ultimately the root cause there would be greater access to education, not the taxes used to fund them. Improving educational outcomes is not dependent on taxes; we use laws to force people to buy automobile insurance and the same could be done with children’s education without the state in the payment loop. Indeed, private schools are routinely better for educational outcomes than the ones funded by taxes. By this logic (that taxation is the basis for the progress in society) one should see greater technological and social advances and quality of life with increased taxation and more centralized standardization, but we don’t. Instead we got a forever drone war and the military-industrial complex. For every GPS or space shuttle or NIST, there is also an Iraq or Vietnam or Afghanistan.

autoexec 3y ago
It doesn't matter how advanced police cars and police training have become over the years if poor people don't have access to their protection. Without taxes, the poor would still get nothing and the rich would still get as much technologically advanced protection as they can afford. Schools have computers today, but even if they'd had chromebooks in the early 1900s, schools would still have been for the elite and the poor would still have been mostly uneducated. Increased taxation absolutely leads to greater technological and social advances and quality of life but only to the extent that those taxes are spent well and only up to a certain point. There's a point of diminishing returns for everything after all. The nice thing about taxes is that we're supposed to be able to have some say in how they're spent, in order to make sure that spending is reasonable. It's a failure of our democracy that we don't have a better handle on massive wastes of spending (like Vietnam or Afghanistan), but not a failure of the very concept of taxation. Taxes are amazing, but the lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability is a real problem. Thankfully it's also one we have the power to fix (and if we don't, we'll need to accept that we have a very different form of government than we tell ourselves we've got)
- sneak 3y ago
  Even with perfect control over allocation, I still disagree with the philosophical concept of taxation because it is done nonconsensually under threat of force. There is no use of tax money that justifies institutionalized armed robbery, it is morally indefensible to violate consent using the threat of violence. You could tax everyone only $1 and use it exclusively for neonatal care and it would still be morally repugnant. If taxes truly represent the will of the people, and people truly believe they are good, they would pay them even if not placed at gunpoint. “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to buy something he does not want simply because you think it would be good for him.” —Heinlein It seems to me that most of your arguments bring up wealth inequality. At that point, why bother with income taxes? Wouldn’t a simple wealth tax on assets over some threshold address the inequality more directly? If wealth redistribution is the goal, why should non-wealthy people pay any taxes?
  - 3y ago

SamReidHughes 3y ago

Everything you're talking about has nothing to do with federal taxation.

oceanplexian 3y ago

I don’t know how much stock I’d put in roads before the automobile was popularized, however the transcontinental railroad, the most impressive piece of transportation infrastructure in the world at the time, was built without Federal income taxes.