Would people prefer to pay no tax under a pure capitalism system ?

[Swirlythingy2025]

Just wondering what others think due to a politics debate with collegues, if we lived in a society with pure capitalism and no state involvement, would people actually prefer to pay no tax at all?

Capitalism requires "state involvement". You and your friends don't understand what capitalism is. It operates within nation states - which are in many ways simply contructs designed to manage wealth - and the level of "state involvement" fluctuates and evolves to manage the challenges to capitalism. If, for example, there were no welfare state at all, then society can become unstable - if people have nothing to lose then they are more likely to rise up. It is no accident that the welfare state in the UK arose out of a war during which the working class were armed and learned how to use their weapons. You don't think that capitalism is really in favour of having to pay maternity pay, do you?

I think water privatisation alone should give us an indication of how this could play out.

That has almost always been the case. Feudalism/Monarchy is a system under which the poor work in order to support the rich, who in return (in theory) offer protection to the poor. Of course, what happens in times when the empires of the rich are threatened by external forces is that the poor are also called upon to defend these realms - and when they are threatened by internal dissenters, the poor are again ordered to protect the status quo under threat of incarceration or sanctions should they too dissent.

In more recent times the coercion has been more subtle - whether through the political promotion of the twin economic fantasies of the free market and "trickle-down" economics, or by using the media to convince sufficient people that the country is under threat from an ever-changing cast of scapegoats; the EU, unelected bureaucrats, immigrants, people on the bus speaking "forrin", experts, benefit scroungers, scientists, socialists and cyclists ...

No, everyone should pay tax.

Police, justice, defence, health and education don’t come cheap.

But it has to be fair, we now have more net takers than contributors and that’s not right. Tax has to be widely spread.

in a pure capitalist system yes

Unless there is some compelling force that makes "the poor" work for "the rich" a pure capitalist system cannot ever exist. "The poor" are also participants in such a capitalist system, and unless forced to work for a pittance they will be free to withdraw their labour - so nothing gets produced, harvested or processed from which the rich can profit - or those not benefitting from the system take control where they can, which in the simplest form involves just looting what they need.