RE: The moving goal
If you refer to feudal times when the lord of the manor had the right to bed your bride first or that as a serf he had the first draw on your crops, implies that there was a certain limitation on a person's rights. There is a real difference between stating something and actually being able to act on it. It is only within the last few hundred years that the consequence of your words and thoughts wouldn't have ended in your execution. Rights are only as valid as your ability for you to prevent your neighbour from superseding them. Your comments about slavery are not misplaced. It is possible to buy a male slave in Libya today for about $300. Is it ethical? Enough people in Libya think that it is so the practice does go on. I doubt that those being sold would agree to that sentiment.
I imagine that you don't wear too many clothes, or eat any food from the grocery store. Neither of those things would be available if there were no roads to transport them. Do you go out every morning and work to maintain your particular share of the roadway? As far as education, in societies that do not mandate that everyone goes to school, very few people do get an education.
No, it was just that a politician had the power to violate rights and get away with it. Just as they still do (they just don't get away with the same stack of violations).
No, your rights remain the same-- but if you can't defend your rights you have less liberty. There's an important distinction.
Government doesn't build roads. It hires contractors with stolen money to build roads. And it spends less on actually building those roads than would be available to build those roads if not for the political bureaucracy which gets a piece of the action. You're getting cheated out of what you are paying for.
Well, actually... not every morning, but yes, I have done so. But since the government claims ownership of that road, I could get molested by their armed goons if I did more than they thought I should. It has happened in other places. A case from Hawaii just a few years ago comes to mind.
That's simply not true. They might not get the education you believe they should be forced to get, but you can't prevent people from being educated (as hard as government schools try). Kids are learning machines. Just try to stop them! Unfortunately, school does prevent some learning. It makes many kids hate anything that smells like education. I have personal experience with this-- and it is a tragedy. After 150 or so years, schools have lowered the literacy rate to almost unimaginable lows. But government schools-- who are the ones indoctrinating kids into believing they are necessary-- won't teach that lesson. Quite the opposite.
But, having said all that, I wouldn't force you to give up The State if you want to keep it-- just don't force it on anyone else in a non-consensual way (which, if it were voluntary it wouldn't be government). Live and let live is the ethical solution to the disagreement.
While for major highways and cities, it is true that contractors are hired to maintain the roads. In rural areas (like where I live in Canada) the roads are maintained by the townships and municipalities. They have full-time staff but they also clear snow in the winters and maintain the road surfaces and ditches during the other seasons. At one point I was on vacation in Costa Rica (a country funded by tariffs not taxes at the time), the main national highway was less well maintained than the country road in front of my house and that wasn't even asphalt, it was compacted self-binding gravel.
Just so you know, I am not in love with the "State", but I have been able to compare lifestyles of those who have both more or less control over their situations. Having any government requires more vigilance and not less. It is like riding a horse and buggy. If you don't keep a firm hand on the reins, it will run away with you.
Yeah, having the State is like leaving just a little cancer inside the patient because the doctor is scared to remove too much of it.