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RE: Left Leaning Liberals and Proponents of Socialism will often offer things like Free Education for All... Medicare/aid for all, etc.
we just have different definitions of free
I don't see taxes as a burden, but as empowerment for democracy and freedom, not libertarianism but democratic freedom
thus I have no quarrel with the system in Germany and most Germans don't
we view universal health care as a human right, It's part of our constitution, like being able to own guns in the USA
If it is involuntary it is not free. If you have a choice it is free.
Whether you decide to believe differently does not change that. Because you are okay with an involuntary choice does not make it free. It just means you are not burdened by that particular requirement from your masters.
Sure, but I would not want to live in a country where paying taxes is on a voluntary basis.
Would you, when you really and seriously ponder it?
I'd wager things would go awry for everyone, not just the poor or the rich, the sick or the healthy, pretty damn quickly...
I think it could be done. Though only now thanks to technology. Imagine for example that all services were funded by crowdsourcing them. If you want to use a service then you would crowd source and fund it. You would have access to that service.
The problem is that governments truly suck and are incredibly wasteful on how they spend.
They are also quite corrupt and hard to keep track of.
Were it not for technological advances it'd be a challenge. I am completely fine with voluntary. You get the services you agree to support.
Thus, you are not charging people to pay for education who will never get one and may already have one. Thus, you are not charging unmarried men for maternity healthcare.
In fact, people could make up crowd sourcing initiatives for whatever they wanted. If enough people were interested they'd get funded and the project would proceed.
Some such initiatives could be ongoing in the form of things like Patreon.
The point is that just because we ARE doing things a certain way now does not mean they are something we should keep doing, or that we should stop pointing out problems and seeking solutions to those problems.
Every solution should be viewed as an experiment. If it fails we learn something and will have new ideas. Yet we learn nothing by repeating things just because that is how they have always been done. In fact we keep repeating a lot of the same mistakes over and over again in historical cycles.