Tax - What is it for?

[Panda-NZ-]

NZ Terminology:
“The free market” = regressive tax and government policies and interventions that benefit landowners, farmers and other holders of assets.

Add a series of monopolies we consider a free market.

NZ Free market: Pay more for a leg of lamb made down the road, compared to a UK customer.

[Logen Ninefingers]

NZ Terminology:
“The free market” = regressive tax and government policies and interventions that benefit landowners, farmers and other holders of assets.
”Socialism” = anything that may counter regressive tax, and promote expenditure on public health and welfare..

Well you defined both ‘the free market’ and ‘socialism’ as - in a New Zealand context - involving extensive government intervention. The classic definition of one of these terms wouldn’t involve extensive government intervention, and the other would.
You’ve been a little biased there in talking about ‘landowners, farmers’ in the first instance, and then referring to ‘other holders of assets’. Since the GFC there has been a huge windfall into the hands of urban property owners simply because of the extraordinary policies of central banks in pushing interest rates towards zero, and carrying out massive QE. This post-GFC ‘wealth effect pursuing’ disease spread from the US, and NZ was duly infected by a virulent dose of it. These property owners still to this day genuinely believe they were entitled to massive capital gains cos ‘hard work’, failing to recognise that they were the lucky beneficiaries of the biggest central bank monetary experiment in history.