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Or you could just move to the libertarian utopia of Somalia, where state capacity is low and you do not have to pay taxes to government.
I am rather sure that most countries pay for their passports. Likewise, "indirect taxation" is inherent in every taxation system I know. "You are not only paying your own taxes, you are paying (through increased prices) the income tax of the mechanic who fixed the engine of the farmer who farmed the corn in your burrito".
The forced labor part was really straining my suspension of disbelief. Waiting in line to recycle your cans using the German system. The horror. It is basically Sered' all over again. They do not even reimburse you for the water you need to clean your cans. I am sure that Amnesty International will start a new campaign on the drink can slavery problem any day now.
(FWIW, I agree that the EU has a general problem with too much red tape. The problem is that the costs of reporting requirements is not coming directly from the EU budget, but is treated as an externality. "Gender pay gap reporting will lose tax revenue on the order of $whatever Euros" is not a framing used as often as it should be used.)
I do not think that the answer is going off grid and farming your own burritos. Quite simply, the gains from division of labor and better scaling are much higher than the tax burden even if the tax burden is 80%. If I need to get an X-ray for a pet, it is tremendously more effective to pay heavily taxed income to some vet who in turn payed a lot for an X-ray machine produced under these suffocating tax and regulatory burdens rather than simply building your own X-ray machine.
While overwrought, it is entirely possible to have a perfectly functional society with much more modest tax burdens.
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This does seem like a dubious dichotomy. The statecraft of prosperous countries has converged to a remarkable degree, but that doesn't mean that "the way prosperous countries do it" and being piss poor are the only two options. Complain about absolute monarchy in 1000 AD, and your snarky interlocutor might have suggested that you just move to the anarchist utopia of Greenland instead!
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