Ethical standards

The impression I am getting from the other posters seems to be an implicit assumption that, whatever social safety net is in place, they will be paying for it, rather than benefiting from it.

From a purely selfish point of view, taking only my own personal rational self-interest into account, fulfilling Objectivism's ethical standard of /my/ own life, then the evidence is fairly clear to me: enjoying Canadian health care means I'm alive, while if I'd enjoyed American health care instead, I'd likely be dead.

When, in a much earlier post, I asked if another poster would prefer a system that complied with his view of Objectivist ethics but in which a great many people happened to die... his response seemed to be based on the assumption that he would automatically be one of the survivors, while, if asked something similar, I would assume there would be a good chance I'd be on the wrong side of the dividing line.

Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day; link

The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it . . . .

The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

(Here is a link to that Lexicon excerpt.)

In this sense, government-issued scrip is valueless... and, thus, a government demanding such scrip "at the point of a gun", as has been described so many times in this thread, is not, in fact, taking away any real value from the taxpayer.

Improper taxation is that which may be said to extend beyond what is reasonable for a sovereign individual to give to the common sovereignty, under a system which takes care to remember it gets its power from the individual.