Your argument isn't making sense. I'll explain what I read it as, and you can correct me, because I'm pretty sure I don't get what you're saying.
"Because the services and benefits I take for granted can hypothetically be produced by someone else, and because it's not wonderful and perfect, it is immoral for the entity providing these goods and services to expect payment. Indeed, such a notion as paying for services that you use is akin to being crippled or having your house burned down."
The problem isn't charging payment for goods and services, the problem is that you can't get them from anywhere else and you have no choice in the matter. If a guy gives me his computer, he can't realistically demand that I pay for the computer I didn't ask for and furthermore didn't need, simply because he gave it to me. The government takes a person's money and uses it to maintain roads, but (A) only a fraction of this money actually goes towards such things rather than, say, killing children in foreign countries with drones, and (B) these services are monopolized by the government and may very well be of poorer quality/quantity than what would otherwise exist.
Nah, man. If you live in an apartment, the landlord isn't showing up at gunpoint, demanding your rent or else you get shot. (If that is the case, move immediately.) He's not acting in some strange and immoral fashion by requiring that your relationship is mutually beneficial, and should you argue that you shouldn't have to be forced to pay rent because you don't like the paint and there are other landlords, he'll laugh in your face.
Generally speaking, you agree to certain terms with a landlord beforehand, and they won't demolish/remake the house, arbitrarily change the conditions, or demand you start buying x, y, and z products from the local grocery store.
You will never pay back the government the money it would take to pave the road from your house to your place of employment, much less the education you received. I have absolutely no problem with investing in my country. I am quite willing to agree that the tax code needs work, because the burden has been shifted away from those who receive the most benefits from their participation in society, but I'm not going to leap to the conclusion that TAXES ARE EVIL THEFT.
But all the money that the government took
could have gone to any number of other things. Just because they
did provide people with roads, educations, etc with some of the money doesn't mean those things wouldn't exist, possibly in an even better state, had they not done so. By this vein of logic, an old Soviet citizen could argue that ending the old system wouldn't work because the shoe factories are owned by the government, therefore if it wasn't for the government there would be no shoes.
It's done better than individuals and charities.
Has it?
If you're going to distort and exaggerate my stance, I will do the same to yours.
Let me go back to your original quote:
I honestly do not give a single solitary fuck about HOW it gets done
So the ends justify the means. Killing a certain amount of people with enough stuff and giving it to the poor would be a very quick and very straightforward method to achieve this. If you just have some sort of dislike towards killing, you can replace it with "imprisoning" or even "confiscating 99% of their assets".
It almost sounds as though you are talking about a plan, but you're not quite there yet. Elaborate this plan. As suggested, I am perfectly willing to listen to your equivalent alternate solution; if you can actually convince me that it meets the requirements, I'll include it in the list of possible solutions.
What, mutual aid? It was a "system" in the late 19th to early 20th century in which poor people, especially with similar ethnic backgrounds or ideological views, pooled their money for certain things and helped each other out in bad times (and if you've ever been low on money, you know how annoying it is to be a few hundred bucks short of the bills because something broke at the wrong time). Since they had a fair amount of money when pooled, they tended to save costs by, for example, hiring a lodge doctor to treat members. Because no one involved wanted a few bums to increase costs by living off of the backs of the other members, they tended to have moral codes that members were required to follow, preventing abuse of the system. They furthermore often opened up hospitals and operated pseudo-insurance companies, though they charged in such a way as to benefit members of the societies first and foremost.
I forgot, nobody ever starved to death in the past; starving to death was invented as part of the New Deal. Damn lazy people, feeling entitled to death. In this country, you have to EARN your death; there's so many hard-working people just begging for death that if we just allowed people to die, they wouldn't appreciate it.
...Yet after the industrial revolution, people tended to starve to death a lot less than before it, government intervention or not. Furthermore, almost all of the huge examples of mass starvation were either intention or unintentional attempts by the government to redistribute wealth. The fare of the poor American man in pre-New Deal America was leaps and bounds above that of a Ukrainian under Stalin, or just about anyone during the Great Leap Forward.
And yeah, regulations are such a drag. I mean, "fire code", "food safety standards", and other ridiculous nonsense.
Let's see, then:
I mean, it's not like the good and noble people and corporations would ever allow fire to burn down a whole fucking factory while people jump to their death,
If you're talking about the same incident I'm thinking of, the primary issue was that the owners bought a loft rather than a factory to avoid the high costs and regulations that existed regarding factories of the time, since they were immigrants themselves and couldn't afford high costs. They worked in the same building themselves, and their own sister was one of the workers at the factory, so obviously they weren't simply cold-hearted monsters with no care for safety. The fire was tragic, but it was a function of New York City's ridiculous laws relating to land and zoning, the effects of which still exist today (hence why NYC rent is so high).
or sell embalmed beef to the army,
The result of cronyism between the US government and a handful of well connected corporations. Cronyism is still very much alive and well, so I don't see what regulations did to stop it.
serve boiling hot coffee to patrons,
Those corporate monsters! How dare they sell hot coffee to innocent and unsuspecting customers! They should be required to sell coffee at room temperature!
gamble with your money in securities,
Oh man, the financial market is so incredibly messed up by constant interventions by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that I can't even take anyone seriously when they try to claim that it is even close to being "unregulated".
sell cars that explode into flames when rear-ended at low speeds,
...
Which was confirmed by later studies to be, in fact, complete and utter nonsense. Unless you're referring to something other than the Ford Pinto.
I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation
Nah, it's still violating people's rights even if its for things like courts and so on, they're just a bit easier to justify as a "necessary evil". Mind, you could argue that you don't even need that, but that's an entirely different argument that we shouldn't even get into right now.
You appear to have a misunderstanding of how government, democracy in particular, works. You do NOT have to be moral yourself to support moral laws. You just have to have a vested interest in things not happening to you. Take murder - even in a society of people who want to murder whoever they want, thoroughly evil murder-folk, there would still be an incredibly strong incentive to legislate against murder - immorality tends to benefit us most when we're the only one doing it, and we're often better off if no one else does it at all (even if it prevents us from doing what we want in the process). You can have a fully functional democracy based on naked self interest - it might not be great, but it would legislate a lot of "moral" activity that no one actually wants to follow personally. That's part of what makes democracy and government so great!
Okay, but that misses the issue that the
government itself isn't going to be composed of moral people. As you say, it's easier to be a murderer or robber if no one else is, so obviously the easiest thing for those in government to do is to murder and rob people, and yet convince the victims that it isn't murder or robbery at all, and that resistance to such murder and robbery is actually a crime in of itself. There is nothing about the government that makes it any better of a "judge" than anyone else, except it has such absolute power over others that those within it can commit crimes that others cannot. So even if you're correct, then the factors that would make immoral murderers and robbers legislate against murder and robbery would cause them to scale back on such actions even without those laws.
Government welfare isn't about compassion. (although it is compassionate, despite what the libertarians argue) But more importantly, most people benefit (or at least potentially) from living in a society where strong safety nets exist.
Most people don't benefit, because such safety nets are illusory and don't actually improve the lives of those they're supposed to. Okay, you can apply to some bureaucrat to get benefits if something bad happens, but (A) Similar benefits could otherwise be acquired elsewhere and (B) At the end of the day, the "moral" person who lives within their means and tries to work hard to avoid burdening everyone else with their problems gains far less than the person who intentionally exploits the system for their own benefit. They furthermore create dependency on such systems, with all the problems that entails.
Question, though: Would you consider it moral to pass a law against murder, ever?
It would be somewhat besides the point. Morality isn't determined by laws.
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