> It doesn’t substantiate your claim that taxation is inescapable.

It wasn't intended as substantiative, but for rhetorical effect.

> This is the crux of the issue.

The crux of the issue is that coercion can be defined to fit any situation. Is a mutual agreement truly free if it is detrimental to one side? Can it be argued that such agreements are made under duress, and thus coercive? Because if so, then most "agreements" are not free. And it can be reduced, ad absurdum that there are no agreement is truly free.

> I’d prefer it if you restated the relevant parts in your own words.

I would prefer not to.

> If you insist, in the case of the former, there is a hierarchical relation that specifies that some people work to produce things of value, and other people have the discretion of determining who is entitled to the benefit of that value. In the other case you have norms that apply to everyone (in accordance with egalitarian principles) and specify a response that is intended to remedy the unwanted phenomenon (rather than punish the offender or deter unwanted conduct).

That is actually a well-founded answer. Of course, the quibble would be the claim that "other people have the discretion". In the case of public morality, "other people" is behind it as well. The decision was always out of your hands- or on another hand, in a participatory democracy, it was always in your hands as a member of society.

> Who says they are?

I don't see you attacking labor regulations, environmental regulations, etc. hamstringing capital with the same fervor. Why all of this concern for labor and not for capital?

> not whatever label is applied to it

And yet you seem to define taxation as inherently coercive even when harvest sharing is interpreted as a form of it.

Furthermore,

>> One dominant factor has to do with the basic nature of the foraging mode of production. Systematic scroungers have no way to force nonscroungers into remaining in the band and continuing to pay what is in effect a tax. And, of course, a community of nonscroungers would have the ability to force a persistent scrounger to change his behavior as a condition of remaining in the band.

>> Because members of hunter-gather bands have no effective means of engaging in a long-run system of coercive transfers, Dowling concludes that reciprocation in some form must eventually occur, or the band will likely dissolve. Here again the free- dom of association and mobility plays an important role in understanding hunter- gatherer behavior. Nonreciprocators are not likely to be tolerated in a band of reciprocators. And an entire band of nonreciprocators is unlikely to have evolutionary success.

https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_16_04_01_mayor.pdf pg. 494-495

So there you have it. Forager societies do experience coercion, and indeed are built upon reciprocity which necessarily includes coercion: either unnamed punishment in the case of the Yanomamo or the Seneca, or the threat of exile from the band (and thus the forfeiture of survival).

> This is well understood and if you’re in agreement then we can agree to have an opt-out system of “taxation.”

It would still likely be called taxes because the usual focus on taxes is on the utility of the revenue and not on the compulsory element.

Such a voluntary system would be indeed an ideal one to work towards, in the same way direct digital democracy or holacracy might also be admirable goals of decentralization, personal autonomy, and the abolishment of hierarchy. In the meantime, however, it seems to be a perfection of the current system, in the same way that direct democracy would be a refinement of the bureaucratic proxied system of representative democracy.

That's because such a system would not be absolutely free of coercion, but only a minimization of it. Consensual transactions can be made under duress, as aforementioned, and such transactions are still structured in ways to include punitive measure for bad actors who break transactions. Therefore there is still violence in the system, merely less of it.