> extreme of no government somehow is an improvement over some government

I'm giving the argument to remove the income tax, not to remove government completely. I'm aware that power vacuums will be filled one way or another. However, the government has grow unchecked due to self-interested officials (bureaucrats, politicians, contractors, etc.) & lobbyists.

> Or are you claiming government can't alleviate the asymmetries of information (the actual 'asymmetry' in my OP)? I do think the government is better at this via regulations. See the Sarbanes-Oxley Act about disclosing accurate financial information passed in the wake of Enron as a concrete example.

As stated in my other post, you statists are very predictable. Sarbanes-Oxley is simply the same interests that perpetrated the centralization & speculation that led to the stock market crash to be the industry regulators. The same revolving door is in EVERY SINGLE regulatory body. The revolving door between regulator and industry effectively allows the large industry players to regulate the industry, thereby adding undue stress to competitors.

> It tends to be a case of groups of officials and experts. And yes, each has their own biases

That the "officials and experts" have common interests that are at odds with those who they are regulating. The word "political class" means something. Do some research on the implications of the "political class" & it's numerous examples of circling the wagons against any grass-roots citizen oversight.

> The utopian ideal you espouse seems better suited to fun though experiments than a large society that must also factor in pragmatism. It's a bit of a privileged indulgence in that sense. I suspect that's why it hasn't ever been implemented in a large, diverse, and complicated society facing tough problems.

If you study history, the Income tax was introduced to raise money for a war that ultimately killed about 100 Million people. Before the income tax & before the FED, the world had unmatched growth. We are the beneficiaries of this innovation, that occurred BEFORE THE INCOME TAX & BEFORE THE FED. The surplus created by the innovation of the population, not the government, created the "privileged indulgence" of the government to siphon money away from the population to support the income of self-interested parties.

You statists are also predictable, in that you forget who pays the bills of the state. So you justify your theft of the population by claiming that the population is somehow spoiled or privileged. You statists have contempt for the people who support you, which is why the state has a terrible history of perpetrating mass genocide against it's own population many times in history.

Your naively over-simplistic historically revisionist ideal that the state is somehow the source of innovation, ingenuity, & human progress is simply incorrect. People make things happen.

The state is an expense & will almost always do tasks in a more expensive, more bloated, less effective way. Why? Because there is no feedback loop to incentivize good behavior while disincentivizing bad behavior of government officials & processes. Let's be real, the state, despite it's high minded rhetoric, always devolves into an organized criminal enterprise & conquerors siphoning the energy away from the people who do the real work in making the world a better place.