Taxation is theft. Not only is it theft, but it is the least effective way of getting things we want. When it comes to important things like justice and infrastructure, the use of taxation as a primary way of funding these things is immeasurably harmful to you and I.
Taxes are the price we pay to live in an uncivilized society.
Schools, fire departments, protection from criminals, libraries; these are just a handful of the prominent public service industries that, while currently provided, controlled, and essentially monopolized by the government: would both cost less than we pay for them now, and have a much higher level of service quality, if the state completely stopped providing them. Discontinuing the government-provided versions of such services would entail relinquishing control of them to the public, allowing services to be inevitably offered by the hungry private sector. We as a society seem to callously overlook all the highly detrimental economic consequences that we suffer as a result of the current monopolization of such large industries, while we ignore the colossal benefits we could all potentially reap by putting the public in charge of them through natural private enterprise. Might sound counterintuitive, but let me explain why it would cost us all less and provide us with better service.
The reason for increase in quality and decrease in price upon privatizing an industry is that if the government stopped providing these services, that would immediately reveal an ENORMOUS demand for these services. When you open up a new, widespread market for ANY industry, you're giving it not only an abundance of new enterprises ready to profit from it, but an imminent spring of competition in prices; which does and always will cause prices to lower as to acclimate to the consumer's budget, under the constant implied economic threat of failing to attain customers and losing money. The same exact principle applies to service quality. Nobody can reasonably deny that a sudden onset of competition for any given consumer base provides blatantly obvious competition to attract consumers by providing better quality of service, which will, 100% of the time; aggressively incentivize the companies within the industry to innovate and increase their service quality in order to win over enough of the consumer base to succeed and profit. When the government-controlled version of one of these industries provides you with less-than-ideal service as far as any basic societal need goes; that's just too damn bad for you, you're still gonna pay every greasy cent of the government mob's protection money, or suffer the consequences, bitch. When it's only private companies providing this same service, and your currently chosen company provides you with less-than-ideal service, then that's just too damn bad for that company, because they've just lost a customer to their competitor and damaged their own reputation as a company. Every single one of these companies, unless they're being owned and run by a herd of livestock, would be well aware and constantly reminded of this economically implied ultimatum to either provide good service at modest prices, or simply fail as a revenue generator.
People want to get rich. When a new and widely viable door to the creation of wealth presents itself, there is never a shortage of ambitious opportunists ready to capitalize on it. That is the one economic crutch that we can always rely on. We can try to pretend it does not exist because the idea of utilizing greed just feels dirty to the average voter, or we can use this greed to society's advantage by utilizing and even relying on it to enable the financial cornering of these industries into continuously and competitively lowering their prices to appeal to a larger consumer base (simply by providing an enormous influx in competition), and to increase their quality for the very same reason. Chances are, as with any industry, there would be those slight per-company trade-offs in terms of quality vs. affordability, so the companies revered as providing the highest quality service would be able to charge somewhat higher prices than their more average-quality competitors, but as a whole, these industries would inevitably become increasingly and reliably affordable, often more affordable than the mandatory income-percentage we had been paying for them before their privatization, especially as technology progresses at such a reassuring speed, particularly when profitable. That's that greed again. It never fails to motivate businesses to innovate. The ability to provide lower prices without sacrificing net profit is a universally appealing concept to any entrepreneurial entity.
If you're more of a visual/imaginative learner; to further envision and comprehend what this basic-service privatization would actually look like in a real-world scenario; imagine that suddenly the government stopped providing fire departments.
Two things would happen:
-Firstly, it seems, to me anyway, to be a reasonable assumption that the percentage of your income that you had become accustomed to being forced into paying the government to fund the "free" fire departments would no longer be taken from your paycheck.
-Secondly, the consumer base for fire departments, which is pretty much everybody, would suddenly start looking for another way to be protected from fires, so the demand for firefighting companies would immediately skyrocket, inevitably causing a gigantic influx in the amount of private firefighting companies that we can choose between. When a viable demand is created, money-hungry entrepreneurs will always jump into the competition to profit from that demand. We can trust greed. At least based on what I've seen; greed is the only unchanging variable in the entirety of economics (and, generally speaking; human nature as a whole). When the number of firefighting companies skyrockets, each company has to compete as far as prices and quality go. I know I'm just getting tediously redundant now but there is a point to this. The consumer demographic for basic safety services like fire departments is an all-encompassing customer base that, for the most part, will not pay high prices when there are other, competitively affordable options. A demand for a given industry and the industry itself, in this case fire safety, is omnipotent enough and when left unfettered, conveniently enough, is particularly favorable towards the small business element that there is no viable potential for affordability or quality problems such as price-fixing and corporate monopolies. Without coercive regulation and taxation, it cannot become overpriced or monopolized (and then overpriced by the monopoly-holding company) simply because there is, in an unfettered market, absolutely nothing stopping small firefighting companies from seizing the opportunity, popping up, and out-pricing/out-servicing the larger ones right out of their customer base, which any entrepreneur worth his/her salt would immediately jump on the opportunity to do if a demand for it arose. The same principle could not necessarily be applied to private jets and mansions, but as far as fire departments go; the companies would have no leeway to rip off the average joe. It would be financial suicide to even try it. The fire departments that the majority of the consumers decide to sign-up for and pay their hard-earned money to are going to be the ones with the highest quality of service and with the lowest prices for such service; AKA the best value. Those are the ones that will succeed, with their emulating counterparts continuously forcing them to innovate and further compete in regards to affordability. This would inevitably and speedily drive the prices down to a lower cost than the taxpayer had previously been forced to pay, and it would provide that same former-taxpayer with a plethora of affordable and higher-quality private fire departments to choose from. This would, most realistically, save the former-taxpayer a few bucks per month and allow them to utilize a more personalized, perhaps more nearby and competent fire department, so that instead of waiting the 10 minutes they would've waited for the nearest public fire department truck to arrive and provide basic service with no incentive to impress; that consumer instead winds up waiting only 2 minutes for the private one right down the street from their own home/business, with the company's team financially motivated to do the best job they possibly can. Every reference to "fire departments" in this entire paragraph could be replaced with the words "education", "personal protection", or "public transportation", etc., and it would be no less applicably accurate.
When the government is providing a service to everybody and making them fund it by using the force of law; the most significant and detrimental effect is that the government is directly robbing that service industry of any of it's potential demand, therefore ensuring that there will be NO reliable incentivizing of that industry to offer any competitively better or more innovative service at any more affordable of a cost. The two things that drive the prices of ANY industrial complex down the most are their services' demand among the lower & middle classes and the individual companies' competition within the same industry trying to attract the same consumer base, often by offering combatively lower prices.
In a sentence; a government controlled high-demand service is an innately unmotivated service that you're paying however much the government decides to force to you pay for it, whereas an unregulated private-sector controlled service with a widespread demand (as any basic service would have) is automatically burdened with an aggressive monetary motivation to provide you with the best possible service at competitively appealing prices.
