My mother likes to say that the government doesn't make money. This makes sense from a certain standpoint. We pay taxes somewhat under duress, and it's difficult to fire a government when the job isn't done right. They aren't selling their services on an open market.
From another standpoint that acknowledges her objection—and I mean this as a pun—the statement may be
wildly inaccurate. You'll see what I mean by the pun in a minute.
Let's imagine something very normal: buying milk at the supermarket. The transaction pays the supermarket and the farmer, and also the government through a tax. Money was made. Who "made" the new value? It would seem to be the farmer most of all, yet the farmer doesn't create milk. The farmer takes it from cows. In fact, the farmer probably pays someone else, or buys a machine. Although there is plenty of work behind the words I just said, the farmer depends entirely on the cows for milk. The cows are also raised and cared for—ideally well, but sadly often not. Either way, there is an outline of a reciprocal relationship. Cows, meanwhile, don't make milk from cow. Cows make milk from grass. This grass doesn't grow from itself, either, but from soil and sunlight. We could step further back into how the sun pushes out energy, but let's stop there.
No one "makes money" alone. That would be impossible. Everything is a transformation of matter and energy, and everyone takes a cut of the energy's influence. Governments provide a stunning number of services and may be the biggest providers of services in the world. In this sense, at least, the government "makes money."
The more interesting practical and ethical question is about opting in and opting out. Let's talk about something strange and unfair and privileged about me for a moment, something I can thank my mother for most of all. As of today, I have three citizenships: American, British, and French. The nice thing about the latter two is that they also carry EU citizenship, so, technically, if I could speak a local language and I was feeling brave enough and competitive enough, I could work in any of those countries like anyone else there. In many of them I could even vote quite quickly, being a resident. So for me, even though all 3 passports are currently expired and need renewing, there is this wonderful sense, for which I am enormously lucky and grateful, of having options.
This is something I would like for every person on Earth. It also comes back to the question of government services. There is research now saying that "big government" actually correlates with happiness and healthier societies. For decades "big government" has been a deep insult on American television. But whether the research has the whole picture or not, we all do intuitively understand, I think, the value of efficiency and effectiveness. If big socially generous governments like those using the Scandinavian model do help support healthy and happy societies, that is not because they are big, but because they are effective and efficient and relatively uncorrupt. They may be "big" in the sense of ensuring many services, but they are not "big" in the sense of being wasteful or bigger than they need to be.
But let me return to the original question and my point. We often rightfully object to services ensured by the government that we do not ratify or even approve of ourselves. The United States split from Great Britain not, perhaps, most of all because of gross humanitarian misconduct, and not even because of an expensive tax, but because of the idea of a tax combined with the insult and impracticality of denying colonials representation in Parliament. Had representatives been in Parliament with influence, they would have debated the merits of a small tax on tea from India to fund the war in India, and whether they won that debate or not, the tax would not have broken into a revolution. Not that year, probably not that century. Eventually, yes. The core dispute was over representation and services, especially at great distance.
Half a century later, or a little more, Henry Thoreau refused to pay his US tax, not because he wanted to stir up trouble, but (if we believe his own words) in spite of his desire to be accommodating and a good citizen. The consequences of this act, of his articulate case for "civil disobedience" and his invention of the phrase used by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others, were felt around the world and are still felt, but we haven't collectively figured out, strangely enough, what this might actually mean for tax.
The fact is that by living in a country and assuming its citizenship and paying its taxes, we pay for membership in a club and the services it provides with the membership dues and subscription fees of taxes. This is at heart inescapably a social contract.
The trouble is that we are not free to shop around, and so the country of our birth absolutely monopolizes us. When I say "free" I do mean
at liberty. You may acquire a citizenship in another country, but rarely easily or quickly. I became an American citizen at 13, having lived here for nearly 10 years. English is my native language. It took about half that time, from entering Kindergarten and being laughed at for my British accent, to learn to speak with an accent more or less indistinguishable from a native's. You can still hear my British accent in my American accent if you listen, and my American in my British, but that's because I speak both all the time and they bleed into each other. If I focus on one or the other for a few weeks, surrounded by others doing likewise, the noticeable influence of the other disappears. As I type now, I'm thinking in a British accent that is not particularly British sounding, in the sense that it is very neutral and unexaggerated. It's just how I learned to speak. Language partly defines us, and it's one of several factors that impede shopping around for the best government "club."
Switzerland is an outlier. It has four national languages. One reason Switzerland's highly capitalist, directly democratic, and relatively socially supportive system functions well is allegedly that, the country being so small, citizens have been able to move a few miles from one canton to another to shop for the best services. In response, the services—the benefits of "club" membership—have improved across the board.
If, like Thoreau, you or I were to go and live in the woods, then we would benefit from few of the overt services of any government, though we would, in a way impossible to calculate, benefit from its protections.
This is where I invite you to consider the terms of subscription to government services, and whether a person should be compelled to belong only to one government. In my opinion, the answer to the second question is "No." My multiple citizenship does not make me superior or immune, but it does make me less likely, I think, to see war as a practical solution, or economic hegemony over more naturalistic countries and societies, or ones still industrializing or trying directly to post-industrialize, to be excusable. We pay so little for the foreign goods we buy so cheap not because they are worth little but because we have the bargaining power to pay little. Multiple citizenship makes this realization bone-deep rather than simply intellectual. That citizen-of-Earth feeling persists, even, I think, if your countries are all "first-world" ones.
We need to make the phrase "social contract" meaningful. A contract is no contract if you are not at liberty to decline to sign it. At present, hunter gatherer societies have little to no protection against the commercial, environmentally degrading encroachments of companies spanning multiple nations. But how many of the employees of those companies work at several companies? How many of them have several citizenships? Or only the default one of Earthling, like my mother when she left Communist Czechoslovakia and the Soviets took her passport? How many of them have time to see what they do to natural landscapes? How many of them have been asked whether they would like to sign the "social contract"? The choice was made for them and they behave as if they have no choice.
If hunter gatherers were protected, if their roaming territories were set aside for them as part of an inviolable contract, then we would have custodians of
wilderness. We would have another reason to preserve wildlife: humans are living there and want to live there. It would only be another step from that agreement to realize that animals too can decline to sign our contract, yet should be allowed to live. If you are not at liberty to decline to sign the social contract, it is not a contract.
