^ The Objectivist position is that the government gets funding only if and when it provides a service for you. Ie: User fees.
This works great for contract/civil law and things, but national defense and also protection against criminals is a different matter.
I know there’s this idea that everyone donate to national defense, and I understand the problem of the 90%(plus military contractors) grasping at the money of the 10% to pursue military adventures, but that doesn’t change the realities of how nations work. But leaving that issue aside for a moment, the issue of criminal law is more important.
Consider a mafia. They run a number of legitimate businesses, and illegitimate ones. They’re philosophically pragmatic. They lie, cheat and steal when necessary, but don’t when they don’t have to. You might ask what a mafia could do in a free society when nothing is banned?
Well, they can run slave shops. They can say what businesses are allowed to open in a neighborhood, and which cannot. They can blow up their rivals’ factories or warehouses. They can do a lot of bad.
You might then ask: who would tolerate them? A lot of people, if the mafia is well organized and deceitful. How do you know your banker is or is not affiliated with the mafia? Do you have the right to search his records, to surveil his property? Do you have the capacity, time, or training?
So, donations to a police force cover this. But who donates? Is a majority of business infiltrated one way or another by the mafia? Will the police, despite elections, go against the guys buying their guns, when the mafia has twice as many guns?
Ultimately, in the absence of a governmental structure that has the absolute authority and corresponding capacity to step in to uphold the law, then economic power is political power. I think you can make a distinction between interfering with trade and commerce, and levying a tax to fund the proper functions of government.
So a good question to ask is: how? I don’t accept ‘democracy’ as a proper answer, because my rights are not to be in the hands of everybody else. So how do you empower the government to tax in a fair and proper way? I understand that the answer is often: you can’t. Maybe you can, because I’ve now decided that you must. But we lose sight of the real for the sake of the ideal. That goes both ways here.
Here’s one idea that makes more sense philosophically, but is hard to reckon with practically: confiscate the wealth of criminals, conscript your enemies, charge fees to the guilty. Let the troublemakers pay for their trouble. But then the government looks for troublemakers… And what if, at the beginning, the troublemakers are more powerful. You need to afford to beat them before you can do it…
I’d say tax has to happen at the marketplace - you can’t tax income or property, progressive, regressive, all that is too scheming and inconsistent. You have a point of sale, 1 time consumption tax (no added value). The government is then constitutionally limited in what it can spend money on, period. Then we can argue about stretching the ‘Crime and Defense’ clause rather than efforts to stretch the interpretation of the Commerce clause.
I’m sure there’s a better specific way of enacting a tax, but nonetheless I still am convinced that a government needs to have some ability to forcibly acquire funding for itself in order to properly protect rights - and like I said earlier: if it can’t properly protect the individual rights of all the individuals within its scope, it doesn’t have the right to protect the rights of any of the individuals.
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