>>13587863>If it's "their money" then why do they need taxes?Because for the money to keep working they cant just print it infinitely.
It goes like this:
The government is the soverign. In the feudal era, the head of the government was the king, in the liberal capitalist era the head of the government is a constitution.
Said government, through legal means, allows certain individuals to control portions of its domain. These people are the 'owners'. They get to control a portion of the wealth of the nation under the idea that they then make something useful with it to benefit the nation under the belief that this is more efficient than centralized planning of everything. The benefit is then 'harvested' by the government in the form of taxes, leaving behind some boon for the owners to encourage them to continue.
Money is sort of like a command. With money you can say "i want this thing here, over there". Whether you are buying food and the 'over there' is your stomach, raw materials and the 'over there' is your factory, manufactured goods and the 'over there' is a hospital or the barrel of a gun. Money is the method used to direct what happens with resources and products.
In older centuries the taxes would just be a portion of the product, but since everything is currently working on an economic system where things are produced and procured using a market things can effectively be transformed into money, and where before there would be a fixed surplus of certain things based on production capacity that would have to be traded directly by the government to other governments now production shrinks or expands and so money is a critical part of it all. Due to these mechanics the government can simply tax its own worthless fiat money because by taking that portion of the money out of circulation is decreases the command ability of the members of its society and increases its own command ability.
