If it's taken from you against your will though, it actually is theft. It's just that that fact discommodes a number of people by cutting to the heart of the nature of governance, so we're conditioned to pretend that it's not true.

Here's something beyond that to think about - a significant number of the things a government does are actially things that would be, in any other context, crimes. In fact, that's arguably the exact nature of a government - it's an organization that claims the right to act in ways that are criminal if done by anyone else in any other context.

Theft is the most common one, and in fact theft of the wealth of (some portion of) the people in a given area is the thing that allows for all of the rest. Governments also regularly engage in kidnapping, extortion and murder. That's what you would be charged with if you, respectively, took people by force and held them against their wills, or demanded payment from people in exchange for allowing them to do something, or killed people or directed someone else to kill them. But governments alone claim the right to do all of those things.

Also, there are a bunch of lesser "crimes" that aren't necssarily crimes in and of themselves, but that the government makes into crimes specifically to create that situation in which they're the only ones with the right to do something that's otherwise a crime - running a lottery, selling restricted products like pharmaceutical drugs, printing money, etc.

And in fact, if we were to make just the small change to holding that it's the case that if an act is a crime when someone else does it, it's also a crime when a government does it, governments would immediately be without either power or purpose. That's how central committing acts that are otherwise crimes is to their entire identity and purpose.

And more to think on - this is a problem because try as they might for millennia now, nobody has been able to work out a way to establish foundational legitimacy for government. Ultimately the nominal legitimacy of each and every government relies on some combination of laws it has established itself and simple force - there is no external, objective thing on which a government's nominal legitimacy rests.

So what we really have are organizations that cannot establish any sort of objective legitimacy engaging in acts that would be crimes if done by anyone else.

Let that sink in.