Taxation only by consent? Wouldn’t that result in a government budget somewhere in the vicinity of… zero? And people that don’t pay taxes should be silent? Should they refrain from voting too?

I very much doubt that changing gas taxes to target middle- and high-income taxpayers would stop complaints about gas taxes, but that’s not my point anyway. Americans pay virtually no tax on gas, and haven’t for decades, regressive or otherwise. This has encouraged people to buy gas guzzlers, and now the entire American auto industry is in big trouble. Taxation on gas and gas guzzlers would have steered people away from a dead-end solution, and that money could have been used to discover an alternative. Call it socialism, call it communism, call it whatever you want — that would have been the smart thing to do.

Some amount of government is necessary, but more government does not necessarily limit productivity or freedom. For example, a socialized medical system allows workers to be both more productive and more free because, if you don’t like your job, you can seek another one without any concern of health care plan differences or lapses in coverage. Instead, many Americans keep jobs that stifle them in part to keep their health plans.

This is even more true for startups. If you want to start a business in a country with socialized medicine, you simply do so. There’s no need to worry about trying to recruit talent with no health plan or a sketchy one. Likewise, if you want to take a year off to develop a ground-breaking idea, you can do that and your health care doesn’t disappear. That encourages innovation and progress — it does not limit it.

I’m not saying that socialized medicine (or socialized anything) is a panacea or even that it is always preferable to a private system. But I very much question the conservative mantra that more government is always a bad thing and always curtails progress and freedoms. Government can and should support productivity, and can and should protect our freedoms.

You seem to start with the premise that part of what you produce belongs to society as a whole–Rousseau’s classic contrat social. This is the essential economic difference between leftists and conservatives. The latter believe that each individual owns what he produces and shares with the government or society only by his consent. I submit that it’s acceptable for people who actually pay taxes to argue about how much they pay, and those who are have the rent paid for them have little moral basis for complaining about how much largesse they receive.

The reasons why gas taxes are criticized are not just that people don’t like expensive gas–first, gas taxes like all consumption taxes are regressive and hit low-income working people the hardest; second, gas tax money earmarked for roads routinely gets diverted to other pet projects (what would we do without art on the buses); and third, it drives up the cost of transporting goods and is therefore inflationary.

We agree that some amount of government and taxation is necessary, obviously. We mostly disagree on the amount of both. In addition we probably disagree on the proposition that taxes are bad for the economy and society generally. Necessary, but a drag on productivity and freedom.