Comment Re:Marketshare (Score 1) 205
Taxation is about diverting a percentage of the energy (or work product) of individuals toward groups, to support organized work for the collective societal super-organism. This is much more efficient than having hundreds or thousands of individuals and micro-hierarchies (gangs) come up with competing and necessarily conflicting plans for collective harnessing and transformation of resources. One thing to remember is that hierarchical governance of human activity will occur, one way or another. It is built into our nature as a species. You get to choose some aspects of the rules or form that the hierarchical governance takes (democracy, inherited or class-based nobility and patronage, dictatorship by seizing control...) and within a spectrum, the slope of the hierarchy; horizontal organization with minimal (but non-zero) hierarchy, or steep totalitarian hierarchy. The reason it is built into our nature is because it is mathematically and thermodynamically an efficient way of coordinating collective activity of intelligent, self-motivated agents and of ensuring stability and cooperation of societal and economic organs.
Organized society often leads to increased security for individual members, and to a productive economy based on competition, but competition within a stable framework of rules and trust.
Anarchy probably entails inefficient scrambling around and squabbling among many competing decision makers, till it settles down and hierarchies of one sort or another, and one level of fairness or another, re-establish themselves naturally because of the efficiencies and power dynamics. And hierarchical governance needs some percentage of resources and member energy (or work output) channeled toward the coordinated collective activities and structures.
In short, some form of hierarchical organization of human activity is inevitable, because it is more efficient than anarchy, and hierarchical organization requires taxation. The grandparent post is correct. All we can and do argue about is the level and focus of use of taxation. Only the most naive argue we shouldn't have it at all, or could sustainably avoid it.