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Originally posted by Joel
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What happens is that taxes are automatically deducted from salaries as they are paid. So what the vast majority of people receive is their payslip from their employer by email saying essentially "This fortnight you were paid $X. Taxes were $Y." It is simply not up to the individual employee to choose to pay taxes or not, their employer has already transferred the money to the government before even paying them. So in this system the government doesn't threaten anyone with physical force, the employer simply pays the relevant amounts to the employee and to the government.
For those that actually do engage in deliberate tax evasion of some kind, the penalties are almost always fines, where the government simply goes ahead and deducts the money from their bank account. I think you would struggle to argue that an electronic deduction from a bank account is "physical force".
So in general, I don't really buy your whole libertarian premise that government taxation is backed up by the use of coercive physical force.
If the deal is really as good as you think--if virtually everyone would voluntarily "jump at the chance" to take the deal, then you would be better off actually making the deal a voluntary offer, and to force nobody into it (including the taxes).
The fact that you need to force everyone into the deal seriously undermines your argument that it's a good deal. Likewise with all the other programs you favor. If they are really such great deals, then there's no reason to make them compulsory. Make them all voluntary. (In which case government would become superfluous.)
But the fundamental problem with the libertarian ethic is it basically prohibits, by definition, any sort of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. So if one person happens to have ridiculous amounts of money, and one person happens to be dying of starvation due to being poor, and the remaining people have exactly enough food to survive on, the libertarian ethic claims that it is wrong for that society to vote to save the life of the poor person by taking resources from the rich person, and insists instead that the rich person must be allowed a voluntary choice to help the poor person. That's simply immoral. I find the entire libertarian 'moral' framework to be evil. It's evil, because it artificially puts 'freedom of choice' above all other goods, and potentially allows for any amount of suffering, hardship, pain, and death, so long as its absurd obsession with freedom of choice is preserved.
Yes, freedom of choice is a good. But it's not the only good. There are dozens of goods - health, happiness, freedom, etc. In my moral view I think it is important to maximize good in general. But that needs to be done in a balanced way. It is wrong to privilege a particular good far ahead of the rest and then to sacrifice all other goods on its alter. So if the choice is between a tiny reduction in freedom for one person to save the life of another person, the moral choice is clear - a small amount of freedom is worth sacrificing for the greater good in that instance. Libertarianism simply gets morality very wrong by advocating immoral choices in such instances. As a result it ultimately has no solution to the problem of income inequality, and would if implemented, ironically, lead to a feudalistic society where the vast majority of people were desperately poor and essentially slaves (or 'serfs') to the few rich feudal overlords, thus resulting in much much less freedom for most people. If having money is considered to give freedom of choice, then given any amount of money and number of people, the monetary distribution that maximizes freedom would be one where everyone has an equal amount of money to spend (assuming the very reasonable premise of diminishing returns in freedom with greater money).
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