In a previous time, I would state to people “taxes are theft”. I clung to this mantra because I believed that any and all forcibly extracted payments that I did not agree to initially, was a type of theft. I had gone far down the anarchist road of believing that the social contract did not exist, and that all governance from its initial outset was unethical and immoral. I had forgotten the roots of the American project of creating self governance. What I had come to realize is that what the philosophy of American self governance was, and the implementation of modern taxation, were two different things entirely. As is the usual case, what exists in the world of philosophy, and what exists in the real world, are two separate things. This is not to say that philosophy cannot be practically practiced in the real world. Rather that what we believe to be ideal, and what we can practically implement, are not going to reflect each other.
What I had come to realize is that I did not have an issue with taxes, so long as what I was paying for directly benefited me in a measurable/observable way. My issue with taxes is that I saw the money I paid in vehicle registration fee’s, and gas taxes that should have been going to road infrastructure repair, instead went into TriMet (The public corporation that runs the mass transit in the Portland Metro area), and essentially wasted on light rail lines that were virtually empty the entire day, or buses full of homeless drug addicts. While the roads I drove on were in poor disrepair, or there were too few lanes for the amount of traffic driving on them (urban centralization is another issue entirely), instead given to other people, directly for their benefit, at my expense. I say this as someone who was making that assessment as a minimum wage worker (or barely above minimum wage for a good chunk of my teens to early 20’s), and did not have much money to begin with. Taxes affect the poorest people in society the hardest, as they have the least amount to tax to begin with. Just from that view alone, taxes should not be extracted from any person at their expense, and given/spent on someone else’s behalf for their benefit. Wealth transfers are universally unethical, no matter the circumstances. This is the reason that taxes ought only be a type of fee that a government levies for a service directly rendered. If you use a road, it is only fair that you pay for the road. If the military defends the nation from hostile foreign threats, it only makes sense that the people defended by the military ought to pay for the military. If a dam is built to prevent flooding in an area, the people living in that area ought to pay for the dam, and so on.
To many, the purpose of government is to provide for the social welfare of people, and thus systems of welfare and social services need to be created at the expense of some, for the benefit of society as a whole. This is fairly ahistoric, with the majority of human history, government (or what amounted to governance prior to the modern nation-state with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia) seldom provided services/infrastructure out of the goodness of the heart of man. If services or infrastructure was created, it was usually at the expense of the people benefited, or built to keep people complacent to prevent them from rioting or engaging in riots/raiding behaviors. Roads almost exclusively existed for commercial reasons for thousands of years, built by kingdoms, empires, and the merchants themselves, to facilitate trade. These roads were built and maintained by taxing the merchants who used the road networks to transport their goods, and as such, there were only as many roads built, maintained, and defended as necessary to keep commerce alive. Some nations, like Rome, built aqueducts, or paid for food (bread and circuses) to maintain large urban centers for purely commercial reasons. When Rome collapsed, and the urban centers could not be defended by a strong and stable centralized state, the infrastructure of the aqueducts collapsed, and the free food went away, forcing people to leave the urban centers for the countryside again. It really was not until the 20th century, well passed industrialization, that we would see anything like Rome had created.
This brings us to the modern day, where the majority of the taxes are collected, and the majority of tax payers who are net contributors, do not net benefit from the taxes they pay, thus making the taxation feel like a theft. Not only is this morally the wrong thing to do, but just from an efficiency point of view, you are taking the profit earnings from productive people, giving it to less productive people, or negatively productive people. Overall, from an economic point of view, this is a less efficient way to spend the money, and overall slows the growth of the economy down, which actually is likely hurting the poorest, and least productive people of all. A growing economy benefits everyone, most of all the poorest people, as they have the most to gain (especially for people who quite literally have nothing, anything to gain means they gain the most of all).
Policymakers, and voters ought to be careful with how taxes are levied, and only levy taxes that are absolutely necessary to keep society functional overall.