First, who says it's my money anyway? Most of the money I make wouldn't be available to be made were it not for the facilitation of the government by redistribution of resources.
Perhaps this is a defensible reply to a narrow understanding of the specific comment that preceded his remark, but it doesn't meaningfully address the challenge I posed, though it may seem that way if you've deeply embraced the state structure, as most people have. To note that redistribution of resources is only necessary because of the state's essential role in maintaining massive inequality of resource distribution is to note that Brice Lord's answer begs the question: the state controls everyone's lives so of course the state should control our money!
An easy way to dismiss Brice Lord's complaint is to imagine a farmer who earns a living by selling food that he grows to his neighbors, making little or no use of government infrastructure. He just works the land that his family has worked for generations, and sells his harvests to people nearby. He is taxed by the government, and if he refuses to pay, men with guns will throw him in a cage and/or take his property. I think this scenario goes most of the way to addressing Brice Lord's point.
As for the rest of us, how many people actually even have the option of making a living in a way that can't be seen as directly or indirectly reliant on government? Whether your career aspirations are about pure altruism, pure self-advancement, or anything in between, it is almost impossible to find a path that isn't state-managed. (If the privileged people that come from where Brice Lord and I come from have that option, they don't seem to exercise it very often. Our former classmates and mutual friends are lawyers, doctors, academics, federal law enforcement officers, Wall Street financiers, teachers, government policy advisors.) So pretty much the only way to make money, by which I mean the only way to gain access to general resources by the means of our personal specialized productivity, is by aligning yourself with the state. And it is this all-encompassing strangehold that the state has on our lives that Brice Lord offers as a defense of the state's all-encompassing stranglehold on the gains from our personal productivity. Obviously I find his argument unpersuasive.
As for Brice Lord's arguments in his other comments, I think he's committed several other errors. First he seems to think that because two-thirds of the annual federal budget (I'll just take his figure for granted here) goes to what are called "social programs," that means most of your tax money supports the "social safety net." He then acknowledges that such programs might be poorly managed, which immediately undermines his argument because poor management means that a significant percentage of that goes to waste. While some are content to politely call this inefficiency, there are thriving industries getting rich off this waste and investing a portion of their proceeds in lobbying to make sure the "poor management" continues. This is corporate welfare, redistributing resources in the opposite direction from what Brice Lord thinks the government is doing.
But you can even put that aside, because even if 100% of this money was devoted to the stated goals of these "social programs," many of them actually make things worse, not better. In order to adequately support this argument, I think we'd have to go through these programs on a case-by-case basis and examine their net effects, which is beyond the scope of this post. (As for the debate at hand, if Brice Lord can simply assert that these programs do good, I can refute him by simply asserting they don't, so at worst I've forced a draw on this specific point.)
Second, he seems to think that a meaningful version of democracy obtains in the US. It doesn't, and never has.
Third, he has only acknowledged negative actions funded by our tax dollars that take place in foreign countries. This might be because he thinks (perhaps fairly) that I've mostly focussed on those (though I did note a domestic issue in the original post). Following from the first point, I'd argue that the vast majority of all government action has negative consequences. An example that I must have mentioned before and that should be uncontroversial is the "war on drugs," which has devastating domestic effects and costs untold billions of tax dollars. Same with our agriculture policies and subsidies. Same with most federal "education" programs.
Fourth, to put all of it together, he seems to be saying that if a government elected by a plurality of a population engages in aggressive foreign wars resulting in millions of ruined lives, that it is defensible for everyone living in the area controlled by that government to be coerced into supporting the atrocities, as long as that government confiscates additional and more numerous funds that are used for good causes. Aside from the already mentioned cheapening-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness of "democracy," this makes a mockery of any notion of government by consent of the governed.
And that the defense of this is that there is no "practical" alternative is shockingly cynical, which is ironic in that Brice Lord's view here is quite common, and my political thoughts are often dismissed as too cynical. But I've never argued that the only way that 300 million people in a given geographic region could possibly live together in relative safety and do a fairly decent job of taking care of each other is by surrendering control of their lives to an institution that sociopathically will do whatever it can get away with to gain the slightest advantage for those who control it, up to and including the mass slaughter of millions of human beings. I might be insane or naive, but I do still believe that there are practical alternatives to such an arrangement.
update: slight edit to the wording of the 2nd to last paragraph.
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