Bianca,

If I’d been able to make it to my local Tea Party, I would have done so, unironically.

The reason I would have done so is that I don’t approve of 30% of my income being taken away from me in order to fund the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to blow up innocent people in foreign countries. Or to throw a few trillion dollars at failing corporations, so as to force me and my fellow workers to cover the costs of their bad investments, all for the explicit purpose of trying to use the force of the state to preserve the economic status quo.

Of course, you could say, “Well, aren’t there some things the government does that you do find useful?” Sure; I drive on the roads like everyone else. But if you total up the numbers, the government is spending more money — a lot more, by several orders of magnitude — on things that I find foolish, destructive, or morally appalling, than it is on things that genuinely help people. If I had a choice, I would certainly be happy to direct my money money away from the government’s war-machine and its corporate bail-out machine and direct a fair amount of that of my money towards things like roads and liberal education and mutual aid for my fellow workers. But, then, if I had a choice, we wouldn’t be talking about taxes anymore. We’d be talking about donations. The distinguishing feature of taxation is precisely the fact that the government makes me pay taxes in, whether or not I approve of the uses that they’ll be put to; and that I have no direct control over what purposes the government puts my money towards.