The purpose is to maintain a stable and viable society.

A stable and viable society will protect every member, but it will do more to protect those people who have money and property, because when societies implode, those with the most stuff lose a lot of it. Those who have nothing have very little to lose.

So it's in your best interests to pay for some social services that rankle your libertarian soul. It means that those who would have little to lose by using violence have more of a stake in the society they live in. Not that they will sit down and reason it out that way, but they will have hope, and a means to achieve that hope, however slender.

It's difficult to rise above your station in life, especially from the bottom. If you have no hope, and no means, to do so within the rules, then they will sink you or you will go outside them. In some cases, this "outside the box" thinking results in new inventions. In others, it has resulted in criminal applications of capitalist initiative, which as unrecorded income is frequently not taxed at all.

The Bill Gates example of the self-made man doesn't work. Someone who could flunk out of Harvard already met the means test to be accepted there.

I'll give you this: the social assistance pendulum, once swung, reached the far end of its period. I will not concede that this means the opposite extreme is its natural and correct position.

Hunger motivates; starvation dulls. Health works; illness drains. Education empowers; ignorance debases. Opportunity knocks; stratification sucks.

There has to be a balance.

Robert of Locksley, aka Robin Hood, a figure of legend, opposed taxation by an illegitimate authority. When the Rightful King returned home (ransomed, in part by those taxes), Robert of Locksley fell into step with everyone else. And incidentally, he wasn't a member of the lower classes, either.

For an example of how yeomen really behave when they perceive that they are getting a sharp stick in the eye, try the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. This was not a case of taxation abuse so much as of restraint of trade. If people have no stake in society, they will put a stake through it.

Regards--
Mary Anne