There is nothing natural about an income tax. However, personal income is a relatively easy thing to tax. Land-value or real-estate-value is also easy to tax, because it happens in the open.
I think taxes are an infringement on freedom; but society needs taxes in order to fund the essential features of government that secures freedom, so I tolerate them.
To that end, "total taxes are too high" is an entirely separate argument from "we are taxing (and therefore discouraging) the wrong things."
Something has to be taxed. As people communicating online we are biased to think taxes on internet traffic are wrong, but dispassionately I don't see much of a difference between taxing traffic and taxing gas (and boy do drivers hate gas taxes). You can argue that gas taxes fund the roads that are being used, but the internet is not entirely self-funded by private enterprise.
Why did you not address a key point of the comment you were replying to, which was that income taxes allow taxation to correlate with how well one is able to carry the burden? It would be nice (and helpful to the overall signal-to-noise ratio) if we all here talked to each other rather than at each other.
Two points on the topic of gas taxes: (1) While it is perhaps still true that the internet is not entirely privately funded (is it?), I'd be interested in actual numbers. Most likely, the public spending on cables is ridiculously tiny compared to the public spending on roads. (2) In some (many?) countries, gas taxes are also justified by environmental and sustainability concerns: they provide an economic incentive to reduce fuel consumption. I don't see a similar concern with mere bandwidth usage. An environmentalist may bring up the power consumption of data centres, but that is a slightly different issue: bandwidth used does not always correlate with compute power used, and so it is still no justification for an internet tax.
Well gas taxes, as I understand them, are also there to help stabilize the prices of gas, to remove some amount of uncertainty in the average consumer's life.
As for "funding the Internet", no part of the Internet is publicly owned in Hungary, is it? So the Internet in Hungary is self-funded by private enterprise, right?
If Hungary offers a public Internet service, then these Internet taxes actually make perfect sense. That's actually a great way to fund a national backbone provider, I'd like to see something like this implemented in the US, if the voters are for it, of course.
I think taxes are an infringement on freedom; but society needs taxes in order to fund the essential features of government that secures freedom, so I tolerate them.
To that end, "total taxes are too high" is an entirely separate argument from "we are taxing (and therefore discouraging) the wrong things."
Something has to be taxed. As people communicating online we are biased to think taxes on internet traffic are wrong, but dispassionately I don't see much of a difference between taxing traffic and taxing gas (and boy do drivers hate gas taxes). You can argue that gas taxes fund the roads that are being used, but the internet is not entirely self-funded by private enterprise.