I heard the opinion where people don’t want to pay taxes that they don’t think do something good, and because the government can freeze their accounts if they don’t pay then they believe it’s unfair.
Presumably, there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom, due to the presence of the aforementioned malicious actors.
So I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart—and whom hopefully one voted for, directly or not—have struggled with it and arrived at a solution that works? And if one legitimately thinks it’s a bad solution and cares enough about it, why not attempt to fix it instead? Is this a failure of democracy? Could it be that it moves too slowly for the modern age? Or is there a belief in some underlying conspiracy due to which democracy is not a democracy and no change is possible?
Regarding rogue agents exploiting the system to avoid paying taxes, I don’t think should be a factor that affects my decision on whether I should pay taxes (like what a criminal does shouldn’t be my guiding principle).
What I would agree on is that there’re people incentivised to attempt to benefit at someone else’s cost, and that those people exist everywhere including corporations, institutions, and the government. I’d also agree that, regarding government specifically, it’s worse because such malicious actors are incentivised to actively seek power because power converts to money very well. It’s a truly regrettable state of affair, because government corruption leads to corruption elsewhere. I think part of the issue is democracies being liable to be influenced by kleptocracies in other countries, who funnel unjustly extracted money into Western economies much to the benefit of individuals at the receiving end.
I just don’t think this can be solved technically, we either work on people not being jerks or we will have them find ways to be jerks regardless of any checks, barring complete thought control and predictive crime enforcement dystopia.
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As another analogy, it’s like a distinction between the spirit and the letter. The spirit is the guiding principle, and the letter is a lossy way to express it. Automatic conversion between the spirit and a letter is not possible: this is a philosophical issue adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness; one human not being able to convey to another human the entirety of what they think or feel, words being always interpreted through another mind’s lens.
Whether the letter can be expressed on paper or as a smart contract, the letter is never going to be equal fidelity to that of the spirit, and for understandable reasons (such as “fallible humans have written it”) should never have precedence over the spirit.
So I wish we invested the effort that goes into inventing higher and higher fidelity letters into, say, alleviating whatever pushes people to violate the spirit in the first place. It’s a much more complex meatspace problem, though.