It's not "plain wrong." When minting a new currency you need a way to bootstrap it into being an accepted medium of exchange, and taxes help serve that purpose. They aren't the only method (and I'm not sure historically whether that was the case for the USD), but it isn't baseless.
Currencies existed well before governments minted them. Plus the dollar was once backed by gold: you can transition from a convertible system to a fiat system, which has nothing to do with fiscal policy.
This reads like an argument, but it doesn't seem to contradict anything I said. Am I misinterpreting you?
> Currencies existed well before governments minted them.
Sure. Nevertheless, to accept a currency as a medium of exchange when it has no value to you personally (bank notes, gold, etc) you need to have confidence that you can exchange it to somebody else for something you do care about, regardless of who mints it.
> Plus the dollar was once backed by gold: you can transition from a convertible system to a fiat system, which has nothing to do with fiscal policy.
Yep. As stated, "[taxes] aren't the only method" to bootstrap a currency, and in practice transitioning from a gold backing to fiat seems to work smoothly (somehow...it's not hard to imagine an alternate reality where the public heard their dollars wouldn't be exchangeable for gold, the public lost faith in the dollar, and the dollar tanked as a result).
As far as I know, there is no currency that existed because there were taxes involved, and that's certainly not the experience of the major fiat currencies.
In fact it might be otherwise: taxes are a deterrent to use currency, which is why barter is so often used by people and small businesses to avoid the tax-man today.
