Marx got profit backwards, profit is not theft of surplus value from workers by owners, profit is the giving of surplus value by both owners and workers. Profit is literally the creation of value, and money symbolizes this. More money is created when values are created, this is why the monetary supply gradually increases over time, because there are always more values coming into existence.
Inflating the money supply beyond the rate of growth of values is irrational. But that is basically what everyone does, because there is no distinction between money in your pocket that was created on par with the creation of values and money in your pocket that was created out of thin air without reference to creation of values. Because there is no distinction there, it is easy to value the money directly and for its own sake, which is stupid. But then again, humans are pretty stupid.
Taxes are just a cost upon profits, which means a partial redirection of created value away from those who make and trade for those values and to others who were not involved. This is represented by the movement of money away from the economy and to the government, since the government has the legal and practical power to distribute that excess. The economy is first order mining of value, the government is second order mining of value. Governments that get either too small or too large end up causing instability and war, because such governments cannot provide for the functional existence of an economy and it is only “an economy” that establishes the system whereby values can be created en mass and over a long period of time, because to create values requires to trade values. The economy is the ability for the average person to freely give his/her surplus value, which is what everyone always wants to do. Contrary to Marx.
Profit is another word for “life”.
As for basic universal income, I think that is a very bad idea. I did the numbers a while ago, even a very modest universal income would bankrupt the government by stripping so much money out of the economy as taxes that the economy would cease functioning and thus the government would collapse, leading to more economic collapse, leading to more government collapse. Also, the idea that a person is guaranteed free income for doing nothing is absolutely insane. The government is not an entity like a family where individuals are bonded locally to each other and freely give surplus value to each other because of the added value they get from that in other ways; and even a family makes expectations upon its members who it helps out.
Health insurance is just a way to extract more value from the economy and redirect it to those who were not involved in its creation. I.e. just another form of taxation. Socialized healthcare is an attempt to destroy private insurance, but not so that a better system (free market system) can be put in place, rather so markets are destroyed entirely and the entire healthcare industry is transferred to the government, i.e. run entirely on taxes. Government makes profit by stealing from people in the form of taxation, therefore a government cannot really make profit in the true sense, because no one freely chooses to pay the government for values it makes. Government just says “here are the values we have, you will pay us X dollars for them.” By robbing the ability of people to freely give their surplus value any value production that the government is involved in will always represent a huge net loss and cannot be counted as profit. Profit means win-win.
Also, corporate taxes don’t really exist since corporations just raise the price of their goods and services when they are taxed. All this does is effectively tax the consumers even more, while making the marketplace less competitive by reducing consumer purchasing power. This naturally benefits corporations who do not really want to compete anyway. The more an industry is monopolized, the more it will gladly accept high corporate taxes.
And the idea of health insurance implies that our health-related activities should be monitored and quantified so that actuarial tables can be drawn up. Just like with car insurance. That won’t really happen though since most people cannot afford health insurance anyway, and if you really built a health insurance model on actuarial tables the cost for so many people would increase even more than they already have. And a healthy person would not need to purchase much insurance anyway, and that insurance would be very cheap for them. But it doesn’t work that way since there are so many very unhealthy people who are subsidized by everyone else. In a true health insurance system, unhealthy people who cannot pay the high costs of their health insurance would be denied health insurance, and then they would be denied health services. Obviously that isn’t going to happen, therefore the entire concept of health insurance is a joke to begin with.