Governments should not have the power to tax. Period.
There are other business models than theft that could be explored. Unfortunately, using power to extract money from people seems to be the preferred mode.
I understand why the founders wrote the eligibility requirements so that Hamilton couldn't be elected president. And why Burr shot him.
/johnny
You know as little about Hamilton and the constitution as you do about political science it appears.
The Constitution SPECIFICALLY allowed Hamilton to be president and he would have been one of the greatest there is no doubt.
Hamilton arrived in the colonies at the end of 1772. Hence, he was eligible to be president as Article II, Section 1, paragraph 6 says. “No person except a Natural Born Citizen, OR a citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; (this qualifies Hamilton as it did other Founders; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. (Hamilton was here for fourteen years.) The Natural Born requirement did not affect the eligiblity of the Founding generation.
When the ignorant criticize one of our greatest Revolutionary heroes, Alexander Hamilton, they are criticizing George Washington who loved the man and supported even after the Jeffersonian scum tried to destroy him. He was the greatest political writer of his generation.
Burr was a typical Democrat crook aligned with the model of corruption - NYC’s Tammaney Hall, the vote stealing sink of thievery. He shot Hamilton because Hamilton had wrecked his political career stopping him from becoming president in 1800 and governor of NY in 1804.
It is particularly gratifying to watch as Jefferson viciously turned on the man who had put him in the White House and proceeded to tyrannically destroy him. Read about the Trial of Aaron Burr if you want to see the real Jefferson.
Hamilton’s death (voluntary from all evidence) also destroyed the secession movement growing in NE which Burr would have brought NY state into had he become governor splitting the union.
There are other business models than theft that could be explored. Unfortunately, using power to extract money from people seems to be the preferred mode.
You've raised an interesting point. Believe it or not, "no taxes" was the norm with respect to the King in medieval times. Sure, the norm was violated recurrently, but the King was expected in times of peace to live off the income of the lands he owned.
The trouble with this idea is, the King owned a large chunk of his realm. Thanks to entail, he could not alienate his lands except through granting a fief in exchange for vassalage - i.e., creating a new noble title. In order for this system to work in a Republic, a large part of the land has to be government owned. Sure, a lot of corporations would go for renting the land they use (they'd likely book it as a capitalized lease) but living American people would not like a large chunk of the good land available only through lease from the government. Even though they fork over property taxes now :)
Before I go on, two points of trivia. Mineral and oil royalties, stumpage fees, etc. are left-overs from the old medieval system. Also: the Civil List payments that the U.K. Royals receive are in exchange for Queen Victoria ceding the Sovereign's lands to the U.K. government.
Ayn Rand came up with a neat system for so-called "voluntary taxation." For every contract signed, a percentage of its value (notional value too) would be paid to the government. For example: if the rate is 1%, the up-front payment on a $1 million life insurance policy would be $10,000. For a $1 billion notional-value credit-default-swap contract, the payment would be $10 million.
In exchange, the government would enforce the contract's provisions if trouble erupts. Those who forego the payment would have their contracts treated as if they were illegal contracts, like gambling debts in jurisdictions where gambling is outlawed. The neat part of this system is that it's truly voluntary. Anarchists would have the option of going it alone, even though they'd still be subject to the criminal law. They'd also have to assume the cost and bother of enforcing their "illegal" contracts, so they really wouldn't be free riders.
Under Rand's schema, the government is confined to retaliatory force against those individuals (and foreign nations) that have initiated its use. The government has a legal monopoly in this area, but it also has to guarantee the provision of said force. These two conditions imply that a poor person, who lives hand-to-mouth and doesn't enter into any formal contracts, gets protected for free. Poor people who don't enter into any formal contracts would be the only free riders in such a system.
As for alternate arrangements like arbitration, Rand is silent. Sadly, they may have to be outlawed or restricted for such a system to work. Those options, however, would provide a competitive force that would keep the rate reasonable (or so it's hoped.)
Another, subsidiary, option comes from the government of Canada's policy on free education for officer cadets in Royal Military College. You get a free education (if you get accepted into RMC) in exchange for serving for at least five years. If you don't want the restrictions, you pay the freight. This system could be generalized, but it would stick in the craw of a lot of Americans. "The rich don't pay! [because they pay full cost for their education]"
Another option is to charge for services that are presently free. For example, the data given out by the Securities and Exchange Commission is relied upon by anyone that's anyone in investments. If Bloomberg can charge a monthly fee for professional-level price data, why can't the SEC for its data?
There are other options to make financing the government as voluntary as possible, but the trouble with all of them is that they depend upon government owning a lot of land and/or having a legal monopoly on the provision of certain services. Thus, the system is both market-oriented and quasi-socialistic. For the land example, there would have to be a Constiutional entail on the land owned by government to make sure that a feckless legislature doesn't sell off the patrimony. That would entrench quasi-socialism in land at the Constitutional level.