Chris 249 said..
Navigational aids are a good example of the need for taxes. Of course, the reason there were no lighthouses was because of the lack of taxation revenue. In earlier centuries sailors died in their hundreds, and their expensive ships and cargoes died with them, for lack of lighthouses and navigational aids
How would the rugged anti-tax individualists run things like nav aids? Would they just hope that someone would erect a buoy out of their own good will? Would radio stations and GPS satellites form themselves?
"Navigational aids are a good example of the need for taxes".Most, as in the vast majority of your taxes do not pay for useful things like navigation markers. About 75% of your taxes are wasted on things that productive people have no interest in, and derive little real benefit from. So cardinal markers are not a good example of the need for taxes.
They may be an example of a good use of tax dollars, but are they a good example of a necessary use of tax dollars? There is a difference.
"In earlier centuries sailors died in their hundreds, and their expensive ships and cargoes died with them, for lack of lighthouses and navigational aids".In early centuries there weren't tens of thousands of ships plying the oceans and coastlines of the world. Economics or necessity is why navigation markers and lighthouses came into being on a large scale. So yes, lighthouses are good, but I have never heard an argument that the humble lighthouse owes its existance to government and its ability to forcefully take money off people.
It would be like saying "if it weren't for the government who used to run power company, there would be no such thing as an electricity grid".
"How would the rugged anti-tax individualists run things like nav aids? Would they just hope that someone would erect a buoy out of their own good will?"Would they just hope that someone would start a volunteer bush fire brigades and volunteer coast guard/marine recue service out of their own good will? Would people just donate their time because they felt generous?
If there is a need for a service, and in the absence of government, the private sector will provide that service, either by way of business or the community.
To suppose or imply that vital infrastructure that facilitated world trade for the last few hundred years would have simply disappeared if the government stopped doing it, or would not have come into being being had the government not started doing it is an extraordinary claim.
You have to be careful not to create a false dichotomy with respect to taxation ie pay tax to the government or the channel markers will disappear. They won't disappear. Why? because they are needed. They will just be provided in a different manner. Why? Because people need them.
People need food, yet food didn't disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed into the steaming crapheap it deserved to fall into.
Interestingly, one of the single most important navigational aids at the moment is the LCD screen which are generally produced by private corporations in China and South Korea.
Several private business interests produce satellites and rockets to lift the satellites into space. Most of the NASA launch equipment since the very beginning was/is designed and manufactured by private businesses.
As time marches on, the space industry will be more and more a private enterprise affair, and it would have started that way if it weren't for governments monopolising the sector post WWII.
It's a bit like people saying "we need the ABC because it broadcasts it's leftist dribble into far flung regions that the private sector won't. But it's because of the ABC that the private sector doesn't.
