How do we pay for our roads?
What pays to fill the fuel tank of a coast guard helicopter? Or to train its pilot?
How do paramedics or firefighters get paid?
What pays to research and prevent and contain and clean up after natural disasters?
Taxes.
Taxes literally pay for civilization. That’s where we are.
I know, I know, this is a hard argument to make in today’s climate, given the last few decades of “government is the problem” and “taxation is theft” and other Reaganisms.
But it’s true. Taxes pay for civilization.
Sure, government graft and greed and crookery are things, but they’re also a sad fact of human nature, so the private sector has them in equal if not greater numbers.
And as a general rule the private sector simply does not care enough to be counted on to provide for civilization’s basic tenants.
That last example especially.
Go ahead and try to imagine private businesses cleaning up after a wildfire or a flood or a Hurricane Harvey. It’s ludicrous.
Just as ludicrous, and well into heartless and despicable, is the notion that we just shouldn’t clean up after such.
Or that we should care less.
Or that less taxes is automatically a good thing.
Or that almost no taxes on rich people, at their demand and for no other purpose than to make them even richer, could ever be a good thing.
Or that access to firefighters or roads or coast guard helicopters should be only for those who can afford them.
Dog eat dog is not civilization.