As far as your rebuttal of the historical examples, well now you’re changing the terms of the argument. All I was saying here is that there are historical examples of voluntary government financing, which you asked. I make no claim about their applicability to modern America.
You complain that I want to know more about the historical examples of voluntary taxation that you cite “off the top of your head”? If you know that your examples are irrelevant or don’t stand up to scrutiny, why offer them? Here’s a good counter example I’ll accept without evidence: there were hunter gatherer tribes on the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago that had no system of taxation, voluntary or compulsory, whatsoever. No doubt true, so what?
Now, Iceland. I checked Wikipedia, and it says “The followers of the goðar [the chieftan] owed them military service” and “At first the chieftains relied primarily on peasant levies”. Sounds like there wasn’t a central government imposing taxes, but military service coupled with “levies” paid to a local strongman doesn’t sound like a voluntary government financing system to me.
From what I gather about Hamburg, you were obliged to pay ¼ of your assets (!) annually to the state, and payment was on a kind of honor system, so you drop an envelope into a chest, and your name is crossed off a list. What happened to the people who didn’t have their names crossed off? Not clear. This does seem like the best counter example to my claim that no voluntary system has ever been instituted, though it lacks the key feature Rand calls for: “tying government revenues directly to the government services rendered.” FWIW, I think this example speaks volumes to the German cultural values of honor and oath keeping*, coupled with aversion to the intrusive means of tax collection then used elsewhere in Europe. Obviously it didn’t last, at least not past Bismarck. I can’t find info on how long it lasted or what brought it to an end. I’d like to know more about it, and am a bit suspicious since I’m having to learn of it from an American theologian whose bio states that he lived briefly in Bremen, not Hamburg.
* One of the features of German culture William Shirer cited critically in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; this cuts both ways.
While I’m thinking of it, there was a case in British history, I think it was in the mid 1700’s, when an income tax was instituted to finance a war. After the war, the tax was repealed and Parliament ordered all the records burned. Ah, the good ole days.