Is it ethical to force people to pay taxes?

Yesterday, I posted something from Bernie Sander’s Instagram in which he remarked that the US is the richest country on earth, and yet half of its population lives from paycheck to paycheck. Bernie proposes that we tax the billionaires. Recently, there was a report which found that many of this country’s billionaires are paying close to nothing in terms of taxes. A Facebook “friend” read my post and was very offended. He replied:

How does giving more money to the ruling class bureaucrats who pay the billionaires going to fix anything? Anything that isn’t voluntary is tyranny, I accept no authority on earth and won’t pretend to change the gang of thieves will make anyone better off. There is no such thing as good government and politicians are parasites and murderers.

Would you agree that any form of coercion used by the government signifies tyranny? I took a college course on the Philosophy of Law. The professor introduced the Command Theory of Law. In his opinion, our legal system operates on the basis of coercion. Famous British legal philosopher, John Austin, said that every law is a command. As modern people, we have a tendency to frown on anything that detracts from our freedom. But that does not mean that coercion is necessarily wrong or unethical. Paying taxes involves some kind of pain, so does paying our electric bills, our TV bills…