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"..., and the pursuit of happiness."

If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).

> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."

The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)

FWIW, I didn't think I was (I don't identify with libertarianism). I'm just looking at alternatives.

I'm sorry - I used "accepted" when I should have used "chosen," since self-determination was implicitly my end. With that in mind: eagerness does not mean you had a choice (though perhaps that's unimportant to you).

There is only a choice if the alternative was actually an option. When the government can force you to eat cake, it hardly matters if you may have enjoyed that first piece. What matters is that you will be eating it one way or another. (That is not what I would call "establishing a free market" - that's not even a free lunch.)

If we are only interested in punitive measures, Kickstarter is just as able to fund prisons and buy guns and pay for legal offensives as any government program (I don't think most forms of damage need a new law as such). (My point from another comment though was that government actions have a strong tendency to be a punitive, and I do not consider that leadership.) Ideally, governments would see no money whatsoever that people didn't voluntarily commit to specific ends. When record-keeping and communication were slow, the current system made better sense - but now that those things are fast and easy, taxation feels like an anachronism.

To your comment below:

> Those 100 people have nowhere near the resources required to take on the company.

I don't see a big difference between appealing to the public for the resources to mount a legal offense and lobbying campaign to revise the law to better support a cause, vs appealing to the government for the same ends. In the former, the individuals affected retain the moral authority and in the latter, the government is cast as a parent figure which I find patronizing and undesirable (not to mention highly susceptible to corruption and self-interest of officials, with access to a bottomless purse). While we may need the latter in times of extreme duress (war), I wouldn't recommend using it that way unless we actually want government interference to be the norm. (IMHO governments should not even have the capacity for selfish behaviour, so I am trying to think of ways to minimize it.)

I have a bigger problem with taxes. Central planning is fine IMHO assuming everyone involved is onboard - otherwise the ship should stay in the dock to the degree people still want off. For what it's worth, I am fond of industry standards when they are documentary in nature and not prescriptive (the difference between designing something to be perfect and picking a winning technology to distill).

Not to disagree with the idea, but I would add that any such tax is at the discretion of the taxing body making it susceptible to difficulties like abuse or negligence. (That makes me wary.)

I would prefer a mechanism without such a centralization of moral authority (ex, Kickstarter rather than taxes). That's the big conflict in free societies: the cohabitation of different moralities. (What is a benefit and what is an externality are decided individually rather than by decree or in the average. I think our desire to average things leads us to think we can work backwards from an average to collective behaviour in cases like these, when not everything is a bijection...)