Because the poor couldn't afford them and most of those are basic services or "rights". You're thinking very middle class here, of course having no taxes and simply paying ADT for your security and netcare for your private hospitals etc is great for those who can afford it, but the country would turn to **** almost instantly. The poor would have no police force, no government hospitals, no water, housing, roadworks, social grants etc etc. It would be completely unworkable. Plus they would have very little benefit from the eradication of tax seeing as they hardly pay it and buy a lot of vat exempt goods.
So your reason for not having private business and voluntary exchange supply these goods and services is that some people are poor?
The moral argument kicks in here, how is it just to steal from some to benefit others? This is hardly charitable or altruistic.
Then we have the utilitarian argument, can government actually provide these things? Well, yes they can, but there's no incentive for them to be efficient, cost-effective or to offer quality in the way private businesses do. The result is what we see all around us: shoddy roads, rolling blackouts, hospitals where you're more likely to die by going to one in the first place etc. etc.
(I'm not going to debate here how I disagree that these are rights. I'd prefer to call them "entitlements".) In any case, going back to your original rationale, rather than having the government provide for all these "rights", if the problem is that people are too poor to afford such goods and services, then isn't the logical and most direct means of addressing the problem to make people less poor. And by that, I mean providing more capital for businesses, more opportunities for people to become employed and earn
something rather than nothing and gaining skills along the way, thus having competition among the labour force driving up productivity and wage rates.
What are the best things to do to get those results? Simple. Make government less of a burden and less interventionist in the economy. Drastically cut taxes, reduce the regulatory costs on businesses, incentivize people to utilize capital by making it easier to start businesses, remove government barriers to entry for the labour force like the minimum wage and race requirements.
I could go on forever about what can be sliced, cut, removed and quashed. The simple premise is this: Who do you really believe knows what better to do in terms of utilizing capital, committing investment and operating charity? The government, or private people and firms who specialize in such things?
Perhaps if you had some sort of tax system whereby some of these private companies have to offer their basic services free to people who earn less than x it could work. It would be a far better system than having government running everything for sure.
I like that last sentence. The analogy I use is this: when we want to stay in a hotel, it's not like the only choice we have is between some crummy flea-ridden motel and a 5 star resort. Yet, when thinking about the government providing goods and services, we are led into this false dichotomy.
We think, if something is "privatized" or not provided for by the government, it must be like that 5 star resort and most people won't be able to afford it, so our solution is to force everyone to only use that crummy flea-ridden motel, or steal from others in the hope of being able to provide a 5 star resort for everyone. This is absurd.
The whole reason why different standards of hotels are available and affordable is because of free enterprise and competition. Hoteliers know that most people aren't going to be able to afford 5 star luxury, but they know they can make a profit providing some kind of hotel, so they cater for the needs of people who don't have a lot of money.
So what we don't need is the government providing services or forcing other people to provide services. We need to let enterprise and competition work. Right now even the poorest of the poor have access to cellular telephones. The government never decreed this a right, and yet the market is so efficient and so eager to satisfy consumer wants it caters for everyone.
As I said above, the real solution is to help people become considerably less poor. We won't achieve this with taxation or entitlements, only with freedom and commerce.
