Taxes as a cost for doing business.

Basically, ‘doing business’ means obtaining sustenance by being useful to other people.
As opposed to hunting/picking/growing your own food, building your own shelter and using pelts to cover your back.

‘Doing business’ obviously implies trading. Raw materials are being transformed to fit the needs of the intended customers, transported to where they are needed and offered to those who might buy them.

For this process to take place, ‘business’ needs far more than entrepreneurs, customers raw material and workforce.

It needs a suitable environment.

It needs roads, markets – not only ‘stable’ but also safe, and – maybe the most important thing, it needs the right kind of ‘popular sentiment’.
For business to work as intended, people need to have faith in each-other.

Yep, faith!

Who would eat in a restaurant without trusting that the cook hadn’t spit in the soup?
Who would buy a car to drive their children to school without actually believing that the car had been built as it should have been?
Who would even drive on a two way road without believing that the drivers going in the opposite direction will stay on their side of the road?

And do you really think that German farmers of yore – who had enjoyed a relative safety while working their own land, living at the bosom of an extended family and being personally acquainted with all the members of the community,  would have gladly come to the ‘unknown’ city to become industrial workers  during Bismark’s ‘reign’ without the ‘safety net’ extended by the Chancellor?

Taxes are the manner in which we pay for all these.
But they are much more than this.
The willingness of the people to pay taxes means that they have faith that the money will be well spent. That they have faith that those in charge will spend the money wisely and that, in the end, those in charge will be held accountable.

Whenever any of the parties involved in this deal – or both at the same time, no longer trusts the other to do its part of the deal – or tries to use their position to access undue benefits… things go south. Way south.

Just as it happens in any other deal.