And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.
And setting aside the principle for a second - how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.
Before the existence of sci-hub, I spent several hundred taxpayer euros to download taxpayer-funded research from journals that my library was not subscribed to. I was not aware that asking the library for a single pdf cost about 30 or 40 EUR, until the librarian told me. Then I stopped because it was obviously ridiculous.
A different question to ask. Why should taxpayers not have access to the articles which they funded for? It doesn't matter whether they read it or not. They pay, they have access.
I would be very interested to see statistics on this, because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I assume your question was meant to imply.
> ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
Count me in this population, although to be honest it literally never occurred to me to check if the local public library had journal access.
For various business interests I have paid full price to read scientific studies quite a few times. And I felt foolish about it later once I learned about Sci-Hub. I'm sure there are many other entrepreneurs that could admit the same. Sci-hub is great and a very important service.