Every dollar paid to the government in taxes is a dollar someone else earned. People are going to complain about that, and it is entirely fair and just to do so. Whether it’s a good idea boils down to where your own politics are, so that’s always going to be subjective.
paying less taxes doesn't imply that the gov't ceases to exist. The gov't has no competition, so every entity within the gov't has every incentive to increase their own revenue by maximally expending tax dollars.
It is up to the people paying taxes to reduce it, as a counter-balancing force, and hold the spending efficiency to a good standard.
It’s not implying anything. That is literally how taxes work. See income taxes: A compensatory agreement between employer and employee is I pay you $X for work. The government then levies a percentage of that money for itself. You can see that on your paystub. You’re not paid $X and an amount equal to a percentage of $X is then donated to the government, that percentage comes directly from your compensation.
It’s a revenue stream for governments, sure, but how much revenue a government needs is determined by what policies a government has in place, their obligations to pay employees and officers, and what additional services the government offers. The politics is all around that stuff, but a tax is still a taking of the money that someone else earned to pay for all that, including to pay public employees.
Sure, legal tender demands a government by definition, it’s right there in the word “legal”. Money, or rather currency doesn’t.
That’s also irrelevant because that doesn’t address what a tax is, or how it ended up in a government’s treasury, or why it is there in the first place.
