I think the core problem is the way that the government is presented to people and the way it has been made to operate is fundamentally flawed. A government should be, in essence, the collaborative arm of a society. There are many things that we can do for ourselves, but there are some things that we can’t, or we’ll be much worse at if we try. Building good roads is expensive and requires a lot of raw materials, but we also all need them in some capacity or another, so we say, “okay, we’ll all put a little money into a collective pile and we’ll use that to pay for roads.” We could all home-school children, but since education is so important not only to individuals, but to society as a whole–the better educated we are, the higher everyone’s quality of life will be directly and especially indirectly thus we set aside some other money to establish a base level of education (presently way to low, tbh) and to build and staff public schools so that people can get the standardized set of skills and knowledge required to be able to work and contribute to society as a whole. Most people don’t want to get robbed or murdered or have their house burnt down, so we set aside some money to hire some people whose job it is to protect us from robbers, murderers, and arsonists, and some other people to put fires out so that they don’t spread and destroy entire cities like they used to.
That’s what a government should be–it’s the part of a democratic society that does the things that are too big or expensive or complicated for individuals to do for themselves.
That’s not how the government is presented or run at all, however. Instead it’s paternalistic and authoritarian, it’s presented as “the boss,” people as “the subjects,” and and increasingly it behaves that way. Police and education have been affected the worst by this. The police are basically a domestic military force that ignores the transgressions of the extremely wealthy while waging a slow and utterly pointless war against everyone else. Public education has been strategically handicapped and interfered with such that the schools areas more resemble prisons and indoctrination facilities, even in areas where wealthy people live because wealthy people send their kids to private schools. (Which is now an industry that has absolutely exploded thanks to voucher programs that were designed specifically to destroy public education under the guise of providing people “educational freedom.”)
The irony is that the wealthy assholes who are calling taxes “suffering” are often the same assholes who want the government to act in this paternalistic and authoritarian fashion–but only as long as the rules don’t apply to them. They whine and moan about taxes because taxes are one of the few rules they haven’t been able to fully exempt themselves from.
