Almost all services governments coactively force you to consume (remember it's a monopoly or oligopoly best case) are overpriced, partially inefficient, don't serve well your interests and/or involves lots of bureaucracy useless crap.
For the majority of the population, having a big government that robs you 50%-65% of your wealth all over your life is not productive at all. And remember those highly taxed are middle class, not the richest, not the poorest. It's fundamentally a massive robbery from middle-class to middle class, but in the meantime all those who live directly from government spending: public employees, politicians, bureaucrats, and all type of lobbies with government influence to take taxpayer money out into its private pocket without clearly serving what the society demands in a free competition solutions offer.
There are lots of toxic issues that a government with such power and stolen money can cause, but I would highlight a perhaps philosophical one: to government never was the servent, despite many people's opinion, but the tyrant, and a quite bully one.
You are its product. You are its source of wealth. It's a parasite and a permanent one during all your life.
There are certainly, logistically and empirically proven things that a government is possibly the best entity to carry the responsibility of, such as things that cannot be effectively given to the free market (just society voluntarily cooperating to solve other people's problems in free competition).
Things like defense, national security (limited to certain types), justice (this can be partially decentralized though) and some sort of public health issues/regulations.
Everything else can be perfectly given to the free market, which will eventually do it better and more efficiently.
If you look at what the government spends on each specific sector, you will find out that as it's today (no efficiency restructurations at all), many EU states spend between 3-5% of its national
GDP on justice, defense, security.
The only winner in all this play is always the government and the parasites that directly benefit from all the stoled wealth.
People use to think you get things for free, but in reality, there is nothing free. You pay things and quite expensively.
The large problem I see is the tendency of having every time larger governments with more coactive power to control your life, impose your over-regulations that will impact your life and finances.
Just look at the number of regulations, laws, and bureaucracy the authorities release every year. It's outstanding and crazy. And it only goes one way: increment over time, rarely decrement or revokes complexity. Taxes go the same. They rarely decrease it.
Come on, only with tax regulations and international stuff many lawyers don't know s**t if you barely make things complex with international regulations. It's a mess with exponential complexity no single human can totally control.
Once the government size increases, it's quite hard to reduce it. Lots of parasites that already built its influence network and
cash-flowing lobby need to remain operative.
But about the pensions? A Ponzi schema, illegal if you do it in the private sector. Your a*s will depend on the a*****e sitting in the government throne every few years, even after paying all the taxes they forced you all your life.
Can't they sustain the pension system because demography didn't go as expected? No problem, let's add 10%
income tax fee on every single fucking employee in the country so we can still keep the faulty system, feed the pensioners and retain millions of votes so we can be stuck in the throne for another 4-5 years. But what about future generations? Politicians and its friends: I don't care, I will be retired,
millionaire or dead at that time. Read about the first Ponzi schema pensions system implementation of
Education? Another major issue that it's controlled by the government, imposing nationalism ideas to individuals, not allowing free competition of education models, dictating the full curriculum of knowledge. A major threat against free-thinking now with all the ideologized education movement.
Governments don't have accountability, hence they can literally do whatever mess they want and you still.
Any sort of collectivism is toxic, inefficient over time, unfair, aggressive and totally immoral.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think zero-government is better than government, I simply defend the idea of a minimum government with far lower level of coercion and minimum taxes. Paying 5% taxes should be reasonable in exchange for what a state should give you. Paying +50% is simply tyranny and a massive robbery.
The only acceptable model for a healthy and free society is minarchism. For individuals today, agorism and counter-economy.
Paradoxically, those collectivist and equalitarianism are the most counter-equal ideas because they defend nothing by unequal obligations, costs and responsibilities within the society, such as progressive taxes (totally unfair and immoral).
Think about a company or
marketplace where the most productive are charged with higher fees and less salary. Surely it will not survive so long. But today's societies are quite the opposite.
Most people got very bad ideas in their heads. I'm fine with that though, the problem is the system is controlled by these people and they will coactively force you to follow the same rules.