>As for all the stuff it does pay for, at best it costs exactly the same amount as you have to pay in taxes. But the government spends money on a lot of other things with your taxes that don't really benefit you. So you would save a decent amount of money.
So one way to look at the issue is, which costs me more: individual purchase of exactly the services I need, or public purchases of those services plus others that I don't?
This is an empirical question, and the answer depends both on what I need and what my government is currently spending money on. But in general, I think it's very unlikely that the first option could ever be cheaper, for most people and most government-provided services. This is because buying these things privately would mean I have (a) almost no bargaining power, and (b) much higher costs associated with coordinating my purchases with the needs and desires of other people.
> This applies to any service. Anything from food production to software development. A lot of people need those things, and they could cut costs if they pooled their money together for them.
I think this is actually a good starting criterion for deciding what the government should and should not pay for. The government should not pay for what I can get more cheaply or more efficiently by acting as a private individual. That doesn't mean it should pay for everything else, of course. But if sufficiently many people would benefit from something, and they can get it more cheaply by purchasing it together, there's a good case to be made for public investment.
Figuring out the line between what the public should buy versus what collections of private individuals should buy is a really hard problem. It's not always a matter of simply asking "is it cheaper if everyone pays in, or just the people who need it?" One of the benefits of a democracy is that we can have an ongoing public conversation about just where we want to draw that line.
> The fact that force isn't applied unreasonably doesn't mean it isn't there.
I agree. My point was not that the force isn't there, but that it is not the source of a democratic government's authority to levy taxes, and accordingly not the only reason that its citizens pay them. A government which people only obey because of the threat of force is an oppressive regime. I am fortunate not to live under such a government, as I think most people commenting here are too.
> There are people that don't consent. At best you could say the majority consent. You can justify it by saying it's better than any other system we know of, but not that people consent to it.
This is one of those difficult questions I spoke of. Obviously, most people do not explicitly consent to the authority of a democratic government. On the other hand, I'm not so sure it's clear that there are people who don't implicitly consent. Even people who disclaim support for the government usually don't take all possible measures to avoid its authority and benefits.
But actually, I agree that 'consent' may not be the right concept for explaining the source of the authority of democratic government. Still, I think there's something right about the consent idea, and I don't think it just comes down to our not knowing of any better system.