Regarding your job, and more specifically your income, the problem is that an income tax presupposes that the government has a right to the fruits of your labor. It is not that taxes are new, or even that income taxes are new, but rather that they represent a form of slavery.

The functions of government cost money. The reason you have roads, fire departments, power lines, clean(ish) air and water, police protection, public schools, national defense, sewers, a safety net for illness or disability, public defenders in court, and the like as an American is because the population pays taxes.

You can choose different distributions of taxation. You could have every citizen pay roughly 1/300,000,000th of the federal budget. (Historically speaking, you'd end up with a large group of starving, broke, angry people on your hands, but let's play the Ayn Rand Utopia Game and assume everyone succeeds.) You'd still be paying for the services.

You can choose what the tax is based on. We use a combination of income, ownership (property taxes, etc.) and consumption (sales taxes, etc.). You can shift that around all you like, but at some level the government is sending you a bill and you are paying it.

You can eliminate services and reduce the federal budget, but it becomes a matter of degree. Maybe you decide that Service X is unnecessary, and the budget is therefore lowered, but you still need to pay for Services Y and Z.

At the end of the day, everyone requires some level of government-level services. (If you dispute this, please look at the history of how things go with no effective government present. See: Congo, Democratic Republic of) If you excessively privatize this, you end up with a plutocracy. If having police protection scaled with what you paid (free market solution), only the wealthy would enjoy any significant protection. (The United States already has plutocratic elements to some extent, but additional privitization furthers it.)

Thus, every successful economy in history has chosen to collectivize functions susceptible to the "tragedy of the commons"-- national and civil defense being the oldest example, but transportation grids, ecosystem integrity, and educational systems are examples of things adopted in every country with a sufficient level of development. These institutions are the reason you can have rights. In the absence of government, your rights are strictly limited to what you can assert by force, and that is when you'd find out what the word "slavery" means.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison

valguarnera@carrionfields.com