Third exit

Taxes are paid because they have always been paid

But if your sleepy thinking consciousness —that which has been displaced by the conjuring somatic habit that reduces "doing things by thinking" to doing things without thinking— remains unsatisfied, you will feel yourself falling down that not unfailingly rabbit-hole that is the regress in infinitum. You have then taken the third exit from Münchhausen's trilemma, a regression from which, in this particular case, you will be able to leave at a moment when everything changes.

Because, yes, taxes, tributes, fees, contributions, levies, royalties, charges, tolls, tithes, tariffs... and who knows what else, have been paid since the beginning of time. But "a beginning" is not "the beginning".

You didn't pay taxes when you were an amoeba —and you were, or so the orthodox scientific narrative that operates like INGSOC with its Big Brother tells you. Just as you didn't pay them when, with your partner and your young, you, featherless biped, hid from the other beasts in some nook of the jungle so they wouldn't eat you alive. Nor did you pay when you began to cohabit with other congeners in the caves. Nor, finally, did you pay them in the initial stages when the primitive group, improvised and inconsistent, became a premodern, intended and organised group, a society.

So, the fact that in your memory warehouse there is no record that there was a time when you lived —and were probably even happy!— and did not pay taxes does not mean that life is impossible without paying taxes.

At that point, without taxes, everything worked by means of a barter of help: I help you so that you help me, a do ut des (or facio ut des) elevated to the category of an unwritten universal rule.

John Doe cured Mr. X and Mr. X defended John Doe; Mr. X defended John Doe and Alan Smithee entertained Mr. X; Alan Smithee entertained Mr. X, and Jane Doe taught Alan Smithee; Jane Doe taught Alan Smithee and Bill Taylor settled Jane Doe's disputes; Bill Taylor settled Jane Doe's disputes and Joe Shmoe cultivated Bill Taylor's fields; Joe Shmoe cultivated Bill Taylor's fields and...

A universal chain (not of blocks but) of favours that worked horizontally quite well until, at a given moment, the invention was screwed up by the vertical invention of money and, with it, of taxes. They, who set themselves up as the authority to mint the money, charged you for minting it and, seeing how good the new invention was, went on to charge you for the use of the money itself (not for what you did or gave with it: this is just the excuse), which meant they could charge you for everything if you used the money for everything: as has come to be the case.

But a door has been opened which They want to close at all costs...