> and yes, taxes can fund things of value that can bring wealth to the society at large, etc etc, but all of that adds to the truth, it does not somehow "undo" this fact.
Isn't the net effect what people are interested in? If you impose taxes and then do nothing useful with the money, sure, that's an easy negative. And if you tax only unproductive private-sector assets and use them for public goods, that's an easy positive. The real-world situation is that you typically tax assets or income that are at least partly productive, and use them to produce things that are at least partly valuable. You come out ahead if the things you do with the tax money are better than what would've happened absent taxation, for some value of better.
The contention of people who support high taxation (as most of us in Denmark do) is that the net value is positive, and we are therefore overall better off and more prosperous than we'd be if we did not have taxation, or had much lower taxation. Partly this is because of a view that certain systemic problems can be much more efficiently solved by the public sector: it's difficult to imagine the private sector producing Copenhagen's public transit system, or the Danish healthcare system, especially for the same money. And partly it's because the prosperity we enjoy seems to generally require a backdrop of "things working well" that the state partly provides: good transit, low crime, few homeless people, safe buildings, functioning court system, educated populace, etc.