Taxes are explicitly and intentionally not fair. It's not fair that I pay taxes to public schooling when I could just send my kids to a private school. It's not fair that I pay taxes to the roads when I drive significantly less than average. It's not fair that I pay taxes to subsidize the USPS when I don't ever mail things.
Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. We agree that society as a whole benefits from every child having access to a high quality education. We agree that society as a whole benefits from free and easy travel. I read an economic report a while back (still trying to find it) that posited that a significant contributor to the US's current economic success and high rate of entrepreneurial system was the USPS. The ability for everybody to mail anything anywhere on the cheap allowed for an untold number of companies to exist and be competitive.
To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor.
> Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair.
I agree with this 100%, and thank you for stating it so clearly.
> We agree that society as a whole benefits from [...]
Well, not all of us agree, but certainly a large majority.
> To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor.
It also sets up a hell of a strawman for the abolition of taxation in general - if the goal is for the individual to pay based on their consumption, then the most effective means of achieving that with the lowest possible overhead would be to allow a competitive marketplace to develop for those things.
For the record, I do support the abolition of all taxation, but find this argument to be very poorly constructed. My justification is that taxation is instituted through the implicit threat of violence.
That said, from a practical standpoint, if we're going to have a government funded through taxation, it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible. That means the ruleset should be as simple as possible, and that using taxation powers to modify behavior should be done rarely if ever in order to maintain that simplicity.
To be clear, our government is not funded through taxation. If the government is the sole issuer of a currency then the government is also capable of paying for anything and everything priced in that currency, full stop.
To put it another way...
Question: those dollars you have in your pocket, where'd they come from?
Answer: The government issued them and they eventually found their way to me
Question: How'd the government have them to issue them?
Answer: They taxed it from somebody else.
Question: How'd that person get those dollars?
Taxation is a method of controlling inflation and the implicit threat of violence isn't directly related or due to taxation, but rather it's connected to the government's monopoly on a fiat currency.
Our government is funded through being the monopoly issuer of a currency that it requires all transactions be priced in while enforcing that monopoly with the implicit threat of violence. Our government (and all governments that are monopoly issuers of fiat currency) additionally use taxation as methods of economic control, but not funding.
> it's in our best interest to ensure the overhead for collecting it is as low as possible
I'm not sure I agree with this. If the government is going to tax as a method of inflation control it's in our best interest that that taxation does the "least harm" and as a democratic society we have the opportunity to vigorously debate based on evidence and research how we define "least harm".
The simplest ruleset possible could easily be "everybody contributes $30k/year" (more or less what my annual tax burden is) but suddenly we're bankrupting a majority of Americans.
Perhaps "as possible" includes an implicit "without bankrupting a majority of individuals subject to the tax" but at that point "as possible" is just a doorway to say "taxing should be simple [except when it can't be]" and to me that's the same as saying "taxing is complicated" which is, finally, to say that I think it's really a whole lot of nothing interesting to say "I think tax rules should be simple".
Edit: And yes, I understand that State taxes (as opposed to federal taxes) do fund State services (Property Taxes -> Schools in CA, for ex), but the States are not monopoly issuers of a fiat currency... It's complicated and hairy but the reason I bring up the issue of funding via taxes vs. issuing dollars is because almost always in conversations about flat tax rates or "simplifying tax code" it's in reference to federal taxes and not state/local taxes.
What about the money banks create through fractional reserve lending?
That ends up being significantly larger than the currency issued by the government, so the government might actually get more revenue from taxes than from money printing.
Nothing about taxation is fair because it's not intended to be fair. We agree that society as a whole benefits from every child having access to a high quality education. We agree that society as a whole benefits from free and easy travel. I read an economic report a while back (still trying to find it) that posited that a significant contributor to the US's current economic success and high rate of entrepreneurial system was the USPS. The ability for everybody to mail anything anywhere on the cheap allowed for an untold number of companies to exist and be competitive.
To pretend like taxes should be associated with the consumption of government services is a-historical, fallacious, and based on any number of lies that vilify the poor for being poor.