Trump’s new cost-cutting department D.O.G.E (“Department of Government Efficiency”), spearheaded by Elon Musk, has really put the cat among the pigeons with its exposure of a number of taxpayer-funded programmes of rather questionable public utility. For example, several USAID (United States Agency for International Development) projects have been sharply criticised by by U.S. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “$1.5 million to advance DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Columbia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

Now, If taxes were consistently set at a reasonable level and devoted exclusively to the sorts of public-interest projects that citizens can identify with or recognise as legitimate, e.g. the construction of highways or reasonable investment in a national defence infrastructure, then they might not pose any serious threat to citizens’ freedom. Indeed, it could be argued that the coercive extraction of taxes is a fair price for citizens to pay for necessary public goods like highways and defence in order to solve the notorious “free-rider problem” - the fact that some people, if left to their own devices, would accept the benefits of public spending without paying their fair share of it.

The problem is, taxation systems often do not even come close to this ideal picture, and even if they happen to work in this way for a time, citizens have little protection against incompetent, extravagant, or arbitary uses of their money, many of which may not even make it into the public consciousness. For example, had it not been for the recent change of administration in the United States, we would almost certainly not be hearing about the bizarre “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” projects that American taxpayers’ money has been spent on by the United States Agency for International Development.