Again, I am not and have not said my taxes are the reason I do or should have a say over the behavior of the government. I'm saying my taxes are my personal connection to the actions of the government, that they are why I care, nothing else. The taxes are my emotional motivation to assert my Constitutional rights.
Your personal connection is the society you, your family, and your friends live in and voting in said democracy and participating to protect it. I’m not sure connecting money to emotions is a healthy endeavor.
Money is a proxy for life and time. If my money is used to hurt someone, that means the product of my time and my effort was used to hurt someone. That makes me angry.
It’s a tool. It’s an important tool no doubt. Perhaps the most important tool in our lives. And you have to know how to wield it appropriately. But do not mistake a tool that enables you to survive for the life itself. Would you get angry if someone used your hammer to kill someone? Or an even more representative analogy, you gave it away to someone, they gave it away to someone, & then that person used the hammer to kill someone. Would you be angry that it was “your” hammer? If yes, how do you define possession? If not, then consider that the hammer and money isn’t all that different here.
Nope, in this scenario you gifted a gun and then they sold it to someone who murdered someone. Because that’s what’s happening (ignoring that gifting is a poor analogy). You “gift” your taxes to the government who then pools your “gift” with all other “gifts” from people and businesses and other revenue streams and then “regifts” that to individual people that work for the government that then do the thing. In fact, your personal contribution to any single person’s salary is basically less than a penny. That’s a lot of guilt for a penny.
For consistency, you should then feel guilty that criminals use the roads we’ve built. After all that was government dollars used to create jobs infrastructure that murderers use to travel to kill their victim and to escape justice. And what about guns in the first place. Government tax dollars go to sustaining those gun manufacturers in the first place, otherwise we wouldn’t have guns for our military. Those guns are then used for murder and all sorts of bad things. And heck, the internet was created through government funding and many big tech companies make a lot of money from the government and that’s got a lot of crime and victimization that happens. So you should feel guilty about that too.
