Your "love it or leave it" attitude towards taxation assumes that all individuals should for some reason resign themselves to the sovereignty of the Unites States Federal Government.
My chosen geographic location is not an admission of consent to be 'taxed' by men with guns.
Edit: Oh cool, looks like I stepped on somebodies toes, they went back and downvoted all my currently votable comments at once. So tell me Mr Revenge Voter. What here do you actually disagree with?
Thankfully that statement makes sense to such a small group of people even if all of you dropped out of society completely it wouldn't make one lick of difference politically or financially.
I'm not the downvoter of your comments, but I basically disagree with your entire sentiment.
Obviously, no one enjoys paying taxes. But guess what, everyone benefits from government services and you have a responsibility not only to the other people currently paying taxes that benefit you, but also to those generations that paid the taxes before us to make our country what it is today.
You will probably be thinking right now 'but I don't use many (any?) government services, I don't need the government to do this stuff'. Sure you can be home schooled, grow your own food, live off the electric grid, protect yourself with a gun etc etc etc etc. I don't care. That argument will never convince me. As a single guy with no kids making way more than the national salary and renting an apartment, guess what, I pay an enormous amount of taxes and get basically no deductions while using almost no government services. Too fucking bad for me.
At the end of the day, this country is what it is because of the massive amount of taxes paid by people over the last 235 years that has gone into settling the country, building the economy, and running our defense dept. It's my turn to pay the bill and while I'm not happy about it, I know I'd rather be paying the taxes I pay and living in this country than paying no taxes in an anarchist state.
I am not questioning that some percentage of money collected at gunpoint by the group of men who call themselves 'government' is put back into society.
I am questioning the so called sovereignty of those with the guns.
I downvoted you because, although I am sort of interested in potential government support for entrepreneurs, I have zero interest in reading an argument about whether countries have a right to tax their citizens. This is HN, not prisonplanet.com.
Well I hope you took the time to downvote this entire thread then.
What is a citizen anyway though?
Edit: I just looked up prisonplanet.com. Interesting how extreme left-wing positions (I am an anarchist) can be easily mistaken for extreme right-wing positions, such as those of Alex Jones.
You can bet that I downvoted the majority of it. (Although I upvoted your comment below about American exceptionalism regarding taxing the assets of expatriates, since afaik it's accurate and it's informative.)
My chosen geographic location is not an admission of consent to be 'taxed' by men with guns.
Edit: Oh cool, looks like I stepped on somebodies toes, they went back and downvoted all my currently votable comments at once. So tell me Mr Revenge Voter. What here do you actually disagree with?