While I consider myself as a sort of a libertarian, I feel that taxation is the most misused of libertarian arguments. And since you’ve expressed similar feelings (coercion, looting and similar words with regard to tax), I feel I should add the standard taxation raison d’etre clause
In modern times taxation is not about funding the King’s summer home or winter vacation. Its about payment for the services rendered to you by society. Now the fair quantum of tax is debatable but tax can’t be completely tarred as looting. That part of tax that gets lost in translation is definitely looting. And that quantum of tax that you pay but services not rendered is also looting but that’s about it. You may not use public transport but your employees might and if they didn’t they’d be that much more expensive and if they were too expensive for you, your quality of life and thus your professional life would suffer. You might have to be cleaning your fan instead of writing this particular post.
You might think that taxing you to spend on the education of some backward region is coercive but you might well be an entrepreneur in MP who finds the perfect resources for his auto ancilliary factory and then you might forgive the govt. for its folly of educating them.
Do you think fighting the naxals is money well spent? Whether yes or no, you might appreciate the fact that people with nothing to lose tend to revolt. teh shortest of crash courses in the history of the last two centuries will highlight that. In a lesser country they might overrun the govt. but for a liberal democracy like ours its confined to the naxalites. And since prevention is better than cure, I think staving off or removing despondency in backward areas is money well spent.
And that’s only a start. I completely agree though with any arguments for transparency of taxation and govt. and public debates on their size.
Finally as I said, I only said I’m “sort of” libertarian. As a philosophy I admire it. But we live in a contextual world. I finally have to live in a society and my contributions define my justification for being there. But a completely libertarian society cannot hope to realise what we as a species can realise. I agree with the some of the anti-libertarian arguments here. There is no space for species-wide ambition. No space program, no nano engineering, no Aids vaccine. Rather it would be a society of scattered communities that barters cakes for plumbing services Happy, yes (not me.. I’m not a picket fence guy myself). Even the libertarian icon, the fabled Howard Roark wouldn’t find productive work for his vison of building utilitarian mega-housing projects.
And finally we do have empirical evidence of what happens when we try to systemically introduce Libertarianism. We get post-Reagan United States and Greenspan economics.