This is a common fallacy, which hurts the ability to reason usefully about problems like those in this thread (regardless of where you fall on the "size of government" issue).
The fallacy is in imagining it is meaningful to separate money (earned or otherwise) from the system of government it was generated in. Your ability to "earn the money" is fundamentally tied to this system, and if you change one, you change the other necessarily (not a comment on the direction of the delta). Thinking about the economy as a thing that exists on its own, and the government as an institution that just "takes away" from this is just nonsensical.
The statement "It's not as if with government we have more money" is quite likely a category error. After all the ideas of money and the ideas of government are so deeply intertwined in their evolution that people haven't managed to separate them, ahistorical thought experiments in common introductory economics notwithstanding.
For what it's worth, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments you are heading towards, I just object to the sloppy thinking variants of them - which are the most common, unfortunately.
The fallacy is in imagining it is meaningful to separate money (earned or otherwise) from the system of government it was generated in. Your ability to "earn the money" is fundamentally tied to this system, and if you change one, you change the other necessarily (not a comment on the direction of the delta). Thinking about the economy as a thing that exists on its own, and the government as an institution that just "takes away" from this is just nonsensical.
The statement "It's not as if with government we have more money" is quite likely a category error. After all the ideas of money and the ideas of government are so deeply intertwined in their evolution that people haven't managed to separate them, ahistorical thought experiments in common introductory economics notwithstanding.
For what it's worth, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments you are heading towards, I just object to the sloppy thinking variants of them - which are the most common, unfortunately.