...proves my point that most people are not capable of applying logic and reason to the assumptions...
Always a good way to get a good discussion going!
This original post seems to hinge on at least one big assumption:
Wages are fixed and fully reflective of the value of a human life.
In other words, without taxes, and the things they are spent on, wages would be exactly the same, as would job opportunities. Shall we look at an extreme?
Let's say that we live in a fully communal state. (We know that human motivation would be a problem, but we're looking at extremes for a reason.) All that you earn (100%) is taxed. All that you need is provided for by that taxation. And government is just barely 100% efficient. If you decrease the amount you are taxed, your needs would not be met because government could not afford it. Ignoring this extreme for now, since I can't even wrap my head around it!
Let's say that we live in an anarchist state. 100% free market. Private individuals and companies form themselves to meet the needs of the communities. If your community wants a road, they hire one of these companies. They pool themselves together, and each give 5% of their income. If your community wants school, they pool their money to pay for the building, supplies and the educators. Maybe they each give 5% of their income. And so forth. The end result being that while you "keep" 100% of your income, you need give it up for these shared services.
Assuming the free market and the government were equally efficient, the net result might be the same. Of course, we know that the government is not equally as efficient as the free market, but we also know that the free market does not necessarily complete everything that might be useful as a shared cost, shared use service.
I think the overall argument, which
sol hinted at, would be which of our needs should be handled by the federal government, where taxes pay for them? Once upon a time, protection from barbarians was sufficiently handled by volunteers, and we did not need that expense. Now we have an extreme in the opposite direction, where we've got what could arguably be an excess of defense (to the point of offense) and a large portion of our taxes pay for that (as well as debt.)
All of this is just to say that taxes are not "tax on a human life" - they are a way to pool resources (money) for collectively useful services, and that if the taxes and government did not exist, but you still wanted those things, assuming the "amount you were paid" was still the same, you'd likely still be paying out a decent portion of that anyway, for the collective useful services you still wished to exist so you could use them.