The State (government) is more evil than good.

P1: Taxes A vital question when talking about taxes is to ask which rights are more important. Is the right to live without just barely scraping by worth more than the right to extra money? Is the right to obtain medicine and health care, which the lack of is a leading cause of death in this country[1], more important than the right to extra money? If the answer to either of those questions is "yes", then we must conclude that it would be acceptable to, say, take a thousand dollars from someone very rich and give it to someone who would then use that money to purchase medicine they needed to live. Since the majority of spending areas connect, it makes sense to charge someone money for something they don"t directly use. For instance, if I don"t use the road system but rely on the police, I still use the road system indirectly"police use public roads to get from place to place. Even if I and my children (if I have any) never go to a single day of public school, I still benefit from the public school system, because it teaches many people vital skills. Even if I never go to college, I benefit from the skills of people who benefited from government-funded scholarships. I might also add that it is possible to not pay taxes: Don"t make any money. If you live as a hermit, supplying all your own power needs, growing/gathering your own food, bartering for any supplies that you need, et cetera, you don"t have to pay taxes, because you don"t have any money to give the government. What are you to give them, tomatoes? If the State is taking away the right to property (to some degree) while granting some people life, when otherwise they wouldn"t have that life (or would be trapped in poverty and be generally miserable), then we can reasonably conclude that, according to the definitions of morally good and morally wrong, the State is doing actions that fall under both categories, leaving us to evaluate how it is on balance. Now, Pro might argue that in the United States the taxes aren"t spent on things that are in the public"s best interest, and I"d agree, but this isn"t just about the current United States government; this is about States as a whole. For instance, what about a country such as Sweden, or Norway? These countries use taxes collecting from citizens with more money to fund programs that benefit the country as a whole (with people with less money benefiting more since they have the chance to get things like health care/insurance, education, et cetera, which they might not be able to get otherwise)[2]. P2: Education I certainly agree that many school rules are odious. But there can be value in requiring that curriculum be state-approved. For instance, would we want teachers teaching creationism? What about a sanitized version of the antebellum South? Or flat Earth theory? And, of course, parents are completely allowed to tell their children to ignore what they hear at school and give them a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me or something similar. P3: War That's only the United States, though. Many countries don't do lots of fighting. And furthermore, Libya was engaged in a civil war at the time. In such a scenario it might be considered acceptable to intervene, even without congressional permission, to expedite an outcome that would save the most lives. 1. http://www.reuters.com... 2. http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk...