Taxes won't fund what I want. Taxes fund what is wanted by the people with the power to create political will. That is, as I said, a matter of a high-school-style popularity contest, except that the stakes are life and death. Do you really think the voters whose political will elected Donald Trump and Scott Morrison — or the mass media who directed that political will — should be in charge of whether we get secure operating systems, public libraries, or ICBMs? Should that political will determine whose research gets funded? The idea is absurd.