Roads, laws, police forces, courts, schools, universities, power generation and reticulation, sewerage reticulation, armed forces, ports, coast guard, air traffic control, diplomats, standards bodies, inspectors, parks, railways, communications systems, etc, ad nauseum.
Taken together, those things provide markets, opportunities, workers, and a safe environment in which to do business.
You’re not a special flower cutting your own path through life, doing everything for yourself. You’re leaching off a complex and integrated system which you don’t or won’t recognise.
A de-facto price/value tag for those is, at most, the amount of taxes one pay
Pay it forward. Your predecessors (not just your parents and grandparents) paid for the environment and infrastructure in which you grew up in and prospered in. During your life you pay for maintenance and upkeep and then when you die it’s time to pay back the debt to your predecessors so that the next generation (all of them, not just your own kids) have at least as good and as many opportunities as you had.
Several of those are non-governmental. Many of them form a tiny part of one’s life: more like a desktop background for your computer. People don’t deal with people working in police, laws, courts, armed forces, etc. during normal daily routine. They observe the rules without the state participating moment to moment. (Ignore the NSA for the present purposes.) Another way to look at it: if one were to list all the non-governmental interactions one has per unit time, it’d blow your list way out of the water.
Setting some rules is legitimate, but ongoing effort to enforce them is a small part of what governments actually spend on. The vast majority is performing wealth transfer, as you must well know but somehow forgot to list.
I wonder what your background is. Did you and your ancestors go to private schools by private roads, and live in private communities with private security, rely on private courts to somehow enforce private (i.e., contract) laws, while enjoying utilities and telecommunications provided on privately constructed systems? Or did you and your family use public education, public infrastructure, public pensions and medicare, public policing and public laws (such as laws against theft or unfair trade practices) enforced by public courts? Do you shop at places that rely on public subsidies so that they can underpay their workers, or who hire people who come up from the public education system? Did you complain when wealth was transferred to you and your family through such mechanisms?
“Did you complain when wealth was transferred to you and your family through such mechanisms?”
This right there shows the depth of your error. Providing services, then collecting taxes to pay for them, is not a wealth transfer. Wealth transfer is the outright deposit of Peter’s money in Paul’s account, where Paul does not provide a service to Peter, merely has “needs”.
It would be nice if only essential and market-incapable services were thus offered. (Being involuntary, “offer” is of course the wrong word.) In any case, you didn’t manage to contradict my point that most people do not interact with the services (ie. public employees) most of the time, and thus while a certain degree of gratitude is fine, getting all emotional with “thank god for government so I can live” is just infantile.
Plus, even if you feel like you are indebted to big nanny for all of its good deeds for you, at some point you must feel that you’ve paid it off, no? Or is arbitrarily large taxation a welcome burden on you?
OK. So what exactly did you mean when you said the “vast majority [of government spending] is performing wealth transfer”? Please let me know exactly what these government wealth transfers are, that are “outright deposit of Peter’s money in Paul’s account,” and not “[p]roviding services, then collecting taxes to pay for them.”
As a quick guide, lets use the US budget figures that have already been linked to above. Show me how the vast majority of government spending goes to wealth transfer. Also note that even those who do not pay federal income tax do pay significant amounts of payroll tax.
You interact with government services all the time. Turn on the lights and you use electrical networks subsidized by the government. Use telecom networks and you are using networks subsidized by the government. Use the roads or transit and you use infrastructure provided by the government. Hire someone and their education and basic literacy and numeracy skills have been paid for by the government. Your own education was probably paid for by the government. Eat safe food, and use safe products and you are relying on government regulation. Shop at places that pay their employees poorly and you’re a secondary beneficiary of food stamps and medicaid. You interact with and benefit from these services constantly, whether you recognize it or not. The entire capitalist backdrop is founded on the belief that the state will enforce property laws through the courts and its police powers. So like I said, unless you use private security to guard your property, and use private courts, private education, private roads, provide your own utilities, etc., etc., you really do need the government so you can live the life you do.
