If I refuse to pay tax it is not 'my' taxes that I refuse to pay, I don't own them. They only become 'my' taxes if I accept them, (if I accept the paradigm of the state as being true, real and correct). I may pay them because I understand the negative consequences I am threatened with if I do not (and I may hand my Rolex to a mugger too but that does not mean I accept he is entitled to rob me - I just don't want to get stabbed).
The threat is not from the 'state' or from the state's 'government'. The threat is from the individuals who would carry-out the threatened consequences under the auspices of their belief that: whilst as individuals they understand they are not entitled to regularly extort from me a proportion they judge correct from my property by threats of violent force and kidnap, with the special office they accept from other individuals, who they believe to be in 'authority' over human society, they are under the delusion they are entitled to act under such irrational orders or mandates.
If nobody believed in or even knew of the concept of the state the concept of the state would not have any effect. It is only the belief in and acceptance of the concept of the state that causes people to act as though it is a legitimate construct.
Conversely if nobody believed in or even knew of the concept of Human Society, human society would still have an effect. If people were then introduced to the concept they would say: "Oh yes, we understand, we have one of those. This is the way we already live together and cooperate".
It is not necessary to force belief in and to force acceptance of the concept of Human Society to cause people to act as though it is a legitimate construct.
There are many many different choices of political system by which a 'state' can exert its control over human society. If a state charged no tax it would follow that it would not need a robust mechanism to collect such revenues. Conversely if a state required the payment of an exorbitant level of taxation it will need to have a robust system in place. That can be a system of precise evaluation and unstoppable collection. That can be a system of providing justification and public support for taxation. The state has a plethora of such controls at its disposal.
If a state turns up socialism, gives widely approved of and more abundant social benefit, it can turn down its more totalitarian methods. There is a cost/benefit equation to be enjoyed between all of these systems and finding the most productive series of balances is the preferred option. The USSR has shown their totalitarianism, driven greatly by warring political idealogical factions and disparate oligarchies, was not the most productive means by which to function.
China has more recently found a different mix where currently their authoritarianism and global-corporate/capitalism appear rather odd bed fellows.
In the UK the system flips polarity vaguely with a minuscule shifting between socialism and corporatism, the two also constantly oozing closer together and further from the relatively liberal society we once enjoyed.
You state "it would be difficult, if not impossible, for capitalism to exist on a large scale without a state" but you do not expound meaningfully on this outstanding proclamation.
Capitalism is no more than trading between people. It is an innate human quality and the fabric upon which humanity is built. You drive the game to me, I kill it, we share it.
The state is the greatest burden on capitalism. All the functions which the state has usurped greatly precludes entrepreneurship from entering those markets. How can, for example, private education undercut a competitor who takes money via the threat of violent force from everyone regardless of if they have children or not.
How would you like your child schooled by protection racketeers who made every child attend an establishment where they controlled the entire curriculum for at least a dozen years. And you think they would not be trying to indoctrinate their pupils?
How would you like those same racketeers to be handing-out the licences to radio and TV stations (or in the case of the UK owning the BBC and even CNN at one point).
How is it my friend that when it was clear to every thinking person before the invasion of Iraq that the planned war was wrong and the claims of WMD were false yet 'the dog did not bark'. The UK and US went to war when the press and mainstream media should have TORN Blair and Bush into scraps - before the killing and destruction of a nation ever got started. And you have the gall, the failure of vision, the intellectual weakness, to suggest I am brainwashed. I can only laugh or weep.
It is corporatism that is dependent on government not capitalism. Corporate owners are greatly granted immunity from their debts and it is corporations who influence government to act in their interest.
Rather than resist what I have to say and defend your way of thinking why not show me you understand the proposition and yet then can argue against it? You fail to do that so I know your resistance is simply because you have not allowed yourself the opportunity to tentatively venture outside of the most basic statist mode of thinking.
