road toll is a fair and natural way to maintain traffic infrastructure.
The problem with that is taxes aren't ringfenced so road taxes don't necessarily go to road maintenance.
I would argue that if you are not forced to pay a tax on your labour or your property, then you at least have some choice on which indirect taxes you pay.
But I believe all taxes are immoral and should be abolished. In their current form, they simply provide a big pot of everyone else's money into which the government can dip willy-nilly for anything they please.
Thank you kindly for the comment.
That is the problem of corruption and centralized state budgets, and not a direct tax, @deirdyweirdy. We have to make a difference between good and bad things, because generalization like ‘all taxes are immoral’ usually leads to even greater mistakes.
It is not immoral to tax vehicle owners for using road infrastructure. You don’t drive, you don’t pay. It would be immoral to tax me, who does not have a car, to pay for the road infrastructure. So, you have to know which taxes are immoral, and which are not. Then we can start the decentralization of the State and reorganizing the idea of a ‘State’ towards the level of humanity.
I'm with you on decentralisation. To me that would solve a lot of the current problems. The closer the taxpayer is to the people spending his taxes, the better his oversight.
Immoral is taking people's money to pay for roads and spending it on government junkets, spy planes or NGOs while the roads fall into disrepair. If you had a budget for road maintenance and then all road users paid to cover it, that would be different. The same goes for social insurance . Everyone pays and there's no medical care available when you need it.