Taxation & Public Finance
The Invisible Infrastructure You're Standing On Right Now
Every time you assume a stranger won't rob you, trust a bridge to hold your weight, or expect an ambulance to actually show up, you are spending tax money.
The Idea
Taxation is usually framed as a subtraction — money taken from you and sent somewhere abstract. But that framing inverts the reality. Taxes are better understood as the purchase price of a certain kind of society: one where enforceable contracts make commerce possible, where public health systems prevent epidemics from collapsing economies, where roads and ports let goods move, and where legal systems allow property to be owned at all. Without these, the private wealth that generates taxable income wouldn't exist in the first place. The economist Mariana Mazzucato makes a sharper version of this point: the state doesn't just enable markets, it actively creates them. The internet, GPS, touchscreens, and the algorithms behind modern search engines all have roots in publicly funded research. Private companies then turned those investments into enormous fortunes — but the foundation was collective. What taxes fund, then, isn't a charity service for those who can't afford the market rate. It's the substrate. Clean water, property rights, currency stability, educated workers, safe food — these are preconditions for any market activity, not optional add-ons. The political philosopher Liam Murphy described this as the 'everyday libertarian' fallacy: the belief that pre-tax income is your 'real' money and tax is a deduction, when in fact that income was only possible inside an infrastructure that collective funding built and maintains.
In the World
In 2003, the United States government spent an enormous sum establishing and maintaining GPS as a global public good — a military technology gradually opened to civilian use. By the 2020s, it was generating an estimated 1.4 trillion in accumulated economic value globally, underpinning everything from logistics to ride-hailing apps to precision agriculture. Not one of those private fortunes could have been built without it. But here's the part that rarely makes it into the story: the original investment came with no expectation of return. It was funded through general taxation, driven by defence priorities, and handed to the world largely for free. The companies that built billion-unit businesses on top of it paid standard corporate tax rates — not a premium for the gift they'd received. A smaller but equally vivid case: the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 in the US allowed universities to patent discoveries made using federal research grants. This is how many foundational pharmaceutical patents — paid for by the public — ended up owned by private companies. The drugs that resulted were then sold back to the same public, often at prices far beyond reach. The tax-funded research created the value; the pricing structure determined who captured it. Both stories illustrate the same thing — that the line between public investment and private wealth is far blurrier, and far more consequential, than most conversations about taxation acknowledge.
Why It Matters
This reframe doesn't tell you what tax rates should be, or whether any particular government spends money wisely. Those remain genuinely hard questions. But it does change the starting point of the conversation. When you think of tax as pure extraction, the natural instinct is to minimise it — it's your money, being taken. When you think of it as collective investment in the conditions that make earning possible, the calculus shifts. You start asking different questions: not just 'how much is taken?' but 'what is it building, and for whom?' It also sharpens your eye for a particular kind of argument that shows up constantly in public debate — the idea that wealth created by individuals should stay with individuals, while costs and risks can be socialised. Once you've noticed that pattern, you'll see it everywhere: in corporate bailouts, in intellectual property law, in planning decisions, in who bears the cost when infrastructure fails. None of this means all taxes are good or all public spending is efficient. But it means the conversation is more interesting — and more honest — than the simple arithmetic of take and keep.
A Question to Ponder
If you traced the origins of your own income — your employer's customers, their supply chains, the education and health of the people involved — how far back would you have to go before you hit something that was publicly funded?
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