Yet you claim not to be privileged?
Let's see, I grew up in a trailer in the woods, constantly hearing about how we were one check away from being out on the street. Every day.
Every day. Any 'privilege' I got came from the sacrifice and love of family, NOT the "benevolence" of government, whose taxation only made living more difficult. In short: we stuck together. But we did it by choice, not at the point of a (metaphorical) gun. I was the
first person from either side of the family in the 100 years of known genealogy to go to college and the first one to get a white-collar job. My ancestors were 100% blue-collar working class, through and through. My roots are not "rich white people" by any means. Heck, the Portugese part would have been considered a racial minority at one point, and the dash of Native American still would be. It wasn't privilege, it was a hell of a lot of work and sacrifice, in a place that, at the time, was not very well developed economically. And I look after my family every day and always will, grateful for how much they were able to do with so little. But it sure as hell wasn't any thanks to people like you. So, no. You don't get to negate 25+ years of hard work and sacrifice, none of which was "easy" under any definition of the word (well, except for the public high school, which was a complete joke other than the AP classes). Fine, I had family. But that means if I owe anyone, I owe them, NOT less fortunate strangers, from whom we never took a God damn thing in our entire lives.
Paying a few fucking dollars out of your wages is not oppressionThe taking of life is murder; the taking of liberty is slavery; the taking of property is theft. My production is mine and mine alone. It is not "owed" to anyone. To assume the government can tax income is to assume they own all your income. Go down that road, and you have NO freedom.
That "few fucking dollars" is about $14,000 a year. And that is before any other taxes (gas, sales, excise) Just
one year of that would be a down payment on a house. Two years would be the elimination of all my outstanding debt.
The only federal government services that I support are the military, post, and roads, which is about $500 billion a year. Let's double it and say $1 trillion to cover war debt interest and all that. OK, the population is 300 million. Let's say only 200 million of them are working, producing adults (the rest being kids and elderly). Unemployment insurance is paid by taxes on employers in most cases. So, do some simple division, and I'm currently overcharged by about $7000 a year. Forcing me to pay for services that
I don't want is immoral. My position is that I should not be forced to pay for them, and in return, I should not have access to them. This is a rational, consistent, and moral position. You might not like it, but you have consistently failed to demonstrate any obligation to my fellow man other than your own belief that it exists.
In the end, I have proposed a simple solution, over and over: let's all go our separate ways and see whose society would be more prosperous. Not just one possibility, but hundreds. That you would force (through the systematic control of money, land, and resources) millions of people to endure a system that they don't want (and that will steal their production, shorten their lifespan, and lower their quality of life) is immoral, and puts you more in line with bible-thumpers, communists, Islamic militants, and tin-hat dictatorships. I don't care who's looking for totalitarian control - I don't care what their intentions are - it is wrong, and they are evil.
I have no wish to control you in any way (other than for you and everyone who believes what you do to be booted the hell out of my life forever), but you wish to control me, even when I am causing no harm. Andrew summed it up best while quoting Batman: "I won't kill you. But I don't have to save you." It's a great quote for this thread: just like Ra's Al Ghul, you wish to destroy what people have, merely because it is imperfect by your standards, and you would replace it with your own twisted vision for the world.