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Larks comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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Unless you're using "can" in a very weak sense - as in "if the revenue was donates to efficient charity", I don't think that's true, because they cause additional wasteful substitution to intra-national trade. Taxes should fall on income (or negative externalities).
You are taking the quote in a too narrow context. Replace pirates preying on internal or international shipping with a bunch of thugs that show up in the market and take every tenth apple for themselves. Or robbing local farmer and craftsman and taking some of their stuff. Or road warriors enacting an environmentally friendly carbon tax on fuel.
I don't understand what you mean. Is your point that taxes can be justified, and that sufficiently advanced piracy is indistinguishable from taxes? Or that taxes are better than pirates? Or that taxes on trade routes are better than other taxes? I agree with the first two, and was objecting to the last one.
Yep.
Generally they are because taxes tend towards efficient banditry at the Laffer maximum. A pirate spending a fraction of their income on efficient charity probably beats out taxes. Naturally a better utilitarian solution is to give that pirate more and more power so he can better and better approximate taxation and spend more on efficient charity, until the marginal gain of efficient charity drops to that of other government spending. Now of course maybe taxes are already too high and do more harm than good, in which case the pirate should stop earlier.
I didn't mean to claim this.