&gt; Regardless of what extent the government does reflect the will of society, you still have the issue that we currently do have a system of personal property rights.<p>We have a system of personal property rights in which personal property is subject to taxation, both <i>ad valorem</i> taxation of wealth (usually, in practice, certain classes of assets are targeted for this, but there is no systemic prohibition in our system of it being applied anywhere) and taxes on particular uses or exchanges of property.<p>So using the existence of those property rights to argue against taxation to support public priorities is quite the self-contradictory argument.