Part of the erosion of that base is the population die off.
Wait, seriously? A couple of hundred extra dollars a year (to a
very worthy cause - a lifesaving one) is going to kill people?
It is never right for any power to steal personal property under threat of violence.
You keep using the term reasonable. Government is not reason. It is force. What is "reasonable" is the sales pitch. Power corrupts and what starts out seeming reasonable will not remain so.
What is "reasonable" is what the majority agree to in the best interests of all. Taxation as "theft" is a minority view, and unsupported by its benefits. Granted, there
are some uses to which taxation is put which are very much
unreasonable, such as militarisation, but that is not a systemic problem; rather, it is a problem contingent on unrepresentative governance.
I know Europe has in some areas gone far towards socialism and on smaller scales for shorter periods of time in old mature well balanced cultures it might work fairly well for a period of time. But eventually spending other people's money fails as a governmental and economic system. Eventually those with the purse strings become corrupt and those getting the handouts get lazy and entitled and things fall apart. Look at Venezuela now for a great example of socialism failing.
You are right, Venezuala is now in dire straits, but could it really ever have been described as "socialist"? Socialism is ownership of the means of production by the workers: I would contend that nowhere has this state of affairs
actually occurred on other than a local scale; certainly never on the scale of a country the size of Venezuala. Always, in so-called "socialist" states, the means of production have been either in the hands of "elected representatives", who do not necessarily
truly represent the workers, or in the hands of "party bureaucrats", who almost
certainly do not represent the workers. And so, I would contend that
genuine ownership of the means of production by the workers - or, in other words, "the average man on the street having his fair share of political power" - would be indefinitely, and positively, viable, just as
is the social democracy (note:
distinct from democratic socialism, even though they sound similar) of "old mature well balanced cultures" in Europe.