“Bob” chose not to participate in the state. That is his absolute right.

One question, though: when the tax bills come due, do you kick in a bit extra each time, you know, to help others?

Let me describe a few other things that have occurred in other times and places.

Land Taxes developed from Quit Rents. Don’t want to pay them? Fine, the landlord can just revert to his alternative uses, e.g. driving his flocks and herds over fields, seizing any that were already being pastured and grazing his own where there were crops. It’s no skin off his nose if he gets the return one way or the other.

British colonies often had Hut Taxes. What happened if the tax wasn’t paid? The authorities came and knocked the hut down. That didn’t leave the former occupants with a choice of paying or perishing of exposure, because they could always move in with someone else. Of course, they would wear out their welcome if they didn’t start helping out… Even so, the approach was changed to a Poll Tax as it became easier to police individuals and rather than keeping the tax take up by the slower methods of the case below (and the authorities were also aware of the sanitary problems of increased hut sharing).

The Byzantine Kapnikon or Hearth Tax was similar but had more refinements that gave it an apparent slack for taxpayers (and it was only practical to introduce it as it was an improvement over an earlier Poll Tax – an English Hearth Tax without the refinements failed in the face of popular resentment when it was introduced). The tax was levied collectively on whole settlements, based on a notional number of people per hearth and a register of hearths updated in tax censuses or Cadastres every several years. Taxpayers who fled were actually dragged back by their neighbours, so they wouldn’t have to pay the difference (but it was no skin off the state’s nose if they didn’t – whole communities didn’t have enough opportunities to flee). Moving in with neighbours lowered the payments over the medium term (this was the apparent slack), but the state then raised the rates per hearth. This led to a Tragedy of the Commons mechanism and clawed back the slack, and also taxpayers got easier to tax as they got more concentrated. (Since the Ottomans continued the system where practical, e.g. in Albania, traditional lifestyles there meant people in Kosovo were still living in family compounds that were convenient to get at when the Serbs came looking for them. Ironically, Enver Hoxha’s modenisations had led to an end to this traditional practice in Albania proper.)

And finally, when it proved difficult to levy taxes on the Anerican colonies more directly, Britain introduced the self-policing Stamp Acts. Various kinds of legal documents needed stamps to be valid. Nobody forced people making transactions to pay for stamps – but if they ever needed them in court, i.e. if they ever sought state aid in enforcing a title, they needed to have them already. The revolt wasn’t sparked by taxes, just by taxes that worked! But the rebels had already conceded the principle of taxation by accepting earlier taxes that they could ignore, so they were driven back onto a specious claim that it was only taxes without representation that were a problem (the same objection didn’t apply to that, since they could have argued that earlier population levels hadn’t justified representation if they were challenged on the point – but Britain didn’t make the challenge, probably because it would have conceded the principle of the new claim). So they produced a result for themselves that was worse than the one they revolted against, both in principle and in practice.