It is an economic necessity that has accompanied civilisation from the outset. All major civilisations had a dole system.henry quirk wrote:"Do we have the right to tax people in order to help the poor?"
If you have the big stick, you can attempt just about anything (take people's shit and keep it, give it to the poor, give it to the rich, toss it in the ocean, etc.)...there's absolutely no need to appeal to 'rights' ('cept as a tool to convince the gullible to not defend themselves, to give over with the goods willingly...that is: convince a fool that it's 'right' he should support another and he will, without as much as a peep).
Again: 'right' or 'rights' got nuthin' to do with nuthin'.
There is a good reason for this. Civilisation takes people away from their traditional means of subsistence, and forces people to specialise in jobs, rather then have diverse trades as once they had. In civilisation people become part of a machine. The machine is geared to push money to the top where a small minority control the resources. The machine changes and people are left without the means of survival and for each cog in the machine there is a period of readjustment. Often civilisation fails to provide work for masses of people, and crime grows.
Traditionally places such as Rome provided Bread and Circuses to make their population's life liveable. The alternative was unrest leading to revolt and eventual overthrown of the government. In the US the method is prison. The media promises everything in advertising whilst the economy provides nothing for millions of people. The result is riots and swelling prison populations.
Civilisation has always polarised wealth. This tendency to inequality leaves the people who create the wealth at the mercy of those who gather and collect the wealth.
Taxation is one way to help redress the inbalance. This happens to work very well, as without a steady demand from the bottom the economy has a tendency to dry up towards the top. If people are out of work because there are no jobs then there is less money circulating where it matters, and only money circulating around the top. The economy dies from the bottom up as there is no point making things that no one can afford to buy, so with each closure the potential exists for more closures and so on.
Your tendency to resent taxation is childish. That money is not yours. It belongs to the state, and they have to right to disperse it as they se fit. If you don't like it, join the political process and learn a bot more about economics.
