Historically, taxes were invented to feed the army. A leader didn't need taxes to pay for things. They could just point at local blacksmith and demand a new spear. But to sustain an army you need a lot of food. The answer is to give soldiers money to buy stuff and demand the money back from the population.

These days a lot depends on what kind of society you have. An extractive society has a strongman as leader and everybody is involved in digging stuff out of the ground. Not much is giving back to society as everybody is just a replaceable pair of hands.

Societies where people's mind is your resource because you design and make stuff, the situation is different. For people to do their more complex work you need education, healthcare, nice neighborhoods.

How taxes are used reflects on where you're going as a society.

Wait, you mean free money is not the way to get rich and feed superiority compex? (c, any official asshole throughout entire human history)

donny dumpster fire doesnt want there to be a government at all. If there was a real government or justice system, he'd be in jail. And I think thats really his goal, fully destroy the entire system to ensure he will never be prosecuted after all this is over..

The community this guy wants to support with government money is rather small. It is basically limited to one family.

For these grifters, the point of having a government is to legally funnel funds into their pockets which would otherwise be illegal.

I was a member of my town’s finance committee for about 6 years. I’m in my late 30s, 3 kids, wife, mortgage. I was the youngest member, the average age probably being mid-60s, and some members in the 80s (2/13?).

I resigned this last year. At our last town meeting, I spoke about this exact point, because it’s been completely lost / brainwashed out of the older generation. The majority of them say something like this:

I ran a business for many years. The government should be run like a business.

This is about as brain dead as it gets for this simple reason: the (local) government is not intended to make a profit (within the US). Every year, we know the town needs to produce a BALANCED budget, meaning no profit because you’re using the funds for services. Every dollar has to be appropriated to some funding.

In other words, there is no profit. It’s just services. The goal is high quality services that benefit the community, delivered on a predictable cadence. If we wanted to make a profit, we could make blind bag kids toys, low grade video entertainment, push TikTok shopping trends. We could make the services cost subscription fees on top of the product. We could make schemes & grifts, bullshit no one actually wants.

I want nice services for my quality of life. Over my time, we met with people every year for the budget, we’d hear about how hard they are working, how thin they are running, and now services being cut. This isn’t some federal government taking our money. This isn’t some state government taking our money. It’s money that goes directly back into where & how we live.

For 6 years, we talked like raising taxes was an impossibility when the majority of the funding comes from the local property tax, more-so commercial than residential. Even then, the committee kept making it sound like it will never work.

These people are absolutely brainwashed from years of Fox and bad faith actors. They only understand things in terms of profit. When encountering a situation where profit CANNOT LEGALLY happen, they STILL cling to it, and rather suggest we have too many teachers, or we don’t really need that benefit. They wanted to cut funding to board of public works, we had a snow storm, and next week, everyone wants to know the state of our equipment & whether BPW should have more money.

I couldn’t do another year of the collective amnesia with these people. We need more young people who give a shit in these rooms debating these geriatrics & reminding them about civics, but I’ve served my time for now.

Not any more. Government appears to be all about stealing as much as possible from the people, starting wars to distract from crime, and shutting up anyone who disagrees.

I am fucking begging you all to understand that governments come into being because violent men do violent things until they gained a monopoly on violence. They don't exist to serve the people. Governments enforce the will of the powerful through violence and the threat of violence. If you don't control the government, you are subject to having violence sued against you for disobeying the orders of that government. Taxation is institutionalized banditry.

The role of the capitalist state has always been to protect the rich first, and then itself. Supporting the community is only done insofar as doing it would support the first two objectives (for example by preventing people from rising up against the rich)

The trouble that I get myself into is that I laugh at stuff like this but then realize people are being serious.