As for the God/church thing, I've heard that church helps some people connect with God. Similarly, government is an instrument that individuals can use as an interface of society. Both church and government may be severely flawed, but they both serve a purpose for many people.
There is one fundamental difference between the (modern)church and the state. You can choose to not go to church. You cannot choose to not pay taxes.
The fact that the state has the power to imprison you unless you pay is a powerful medium. And some would say you cannot get good results through bad means.
The State is not society. It's a social construct and organization like any other, and society predates a functioning State. It is definitely not owed anything because its not a person. Its like saying you owe the earth, or the stars. The taxes however, are levied by people. How do people get the benefit to dispose of your income, against your consent, in the name of society?
Thanks for taking the time to lay that out. I disagree with you about taxes thing, but I think what we have is a difference of opinion; I don't think your position is provably wrong. I hope you will grant that my position, that it can be just for the state to levy taxes for social programs and other programs, is also a valid opinion, and it is also not provably wrong.
This may sound like copping out of the argument, but I don't think that's it. This is accepting that my political opinions are not the only valid positions, and I welcome disagreement and discussion.
No animosity on my side! Its just an exchange of ideas.
I have two answers to the idea that taxes are what help other people. The first is that the government budget spends a fraction of its spending in progressive benefits. First, many of the things it does do not help society, or even help the people that need that help the most, and it does it while taking a big cut.
The U.S. government accounts for 36% of gdp spending every year. One out of 3 dollars is spent by the state. If you replaced the government with a machine that just cuts out an equal check to every single person in the U.S., it would be a universal basic income of 20.000U$S a year.
The above is to give an intuition on what the actual government actually is. It gets that amount of money, but there is nowhere nearly that level of redistribution.
I like equating the state with the church because again, when a believer puts money in the church box, he thinks he is helping God's cause, but he is helping the priest first.
The other answer is that the government often spends the money in regressive benefits. That is the benefit helps the upper half more than the lower half. That is a classic issue with Social Security for example. You can google Milton Friedman's social security talk for a great explanation of why SS is regressive.
So not only it spends an enormous amount of what it collects, but sometimes even redistributes it against reasonable economic principles.
