This is not how things worked in the past. Income tax is a modern invention and if the government or anyone who was in power wanted money, they would take it and punish you if you resisted. There was nothing voluntary about it. The key difference is that governments tend to tax you either or force "tribute" per head or per property or per trade port, and your family, religious group, guild, protector, tribe, and lord would have their own "taxes", either as a percentage of what you produce or seasonal fees. Governments tended to leave you alone and focused on roads, the military, and courts. As for the military, it tended to be forced on each land owner to supply a certain number of people when the region needed it, and there were strict penalties for both avoiding military service or trying to take advantage of unoccupied land because the owner was serving. Also, people in the military often needed to pay their own way and provide their own weapons. In modern times, everything is centralized and the government has done its best to get rid of all competitions so families, religion, guilds, tribes, and "lords" have all been dis-empowered, except those who found a way to become so powerful that they span nations. Because there's little competition, there's only one organization to pay and only one organization to plan your life because there is no competition, that organization keeps wanting to grow and take over ever more of your life. Centralization is the issue, not taxes. With competition from the local groups, you may not be freer, but you will have more flexibility on which groups to pay taxes to and services are more customized and taxes are lower since no-one group wants the other groups to grow too big and will go to war to assert this. Does monero help fix this? To some extent. It forces government to depend more on property and head taxes and user fees for government services since it's possible to hide income taxes, sales taxes, transaction taxes, etc. But it's not a solution for building up the other competing groups to supplement government as has been shown to work in all countries around the world for thousands of years.