The purpose of life is to thrive. Man thrives by virtue of productive work and produces by means of his conceptual mind. He is born ignorant, and must learn everything that he is to know. Learning is a form of productive work, but not all areas of knowledge are equally important. One important area of knowledge is ethics, the branch of philosophy whose purpose is to answer the question "What should I do?" This question is as permanent as your life, as inevitable as the passage of time.
The purpose of government is to protect individual rights. In order to protect individual rights, the police, the courts, the prisons, the military, and the administration must exist. In order to fund these organizations, the government has the moral right to tax. But every penny spent for any purpose other than the protection of individual rights constitutes a violation of individual rights. A man's earnings properly belong to him. It is the job of the government to see to it that we are free to keep our earnings; it is immoral for the government to act as an organizer and facilitator of theft. It is immoral to support politically those who advocate immoral use of political power.