Many Americans treat a larger public budget as an obvious social good: if a problem persists, the remedy is another transfer from private production to government.
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A functioning society needs government to do a short list of things well — primarily courts, policing, firefighting, and basic infrastructure. The mistake is the further premise that dollars automatically serve society better once they leave private hands.
Taxes are compulsory. They are force. That is not a slogan; it is why public spending needs a higher burden of proof than private spending. Citizens should not be required to satisfy a politician’s appetite to spend. Before they surrender another slice of private wealth, they should ask three questions. Do I actually want a larger government? Can I trust this government to fix the potholes rather than buy more surveillance cameras? Can I trust it to maintain parks rather than accommodating homeless encampments?
Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money explain the incentive problem typical of government spending.
When you spend your own money on yourself, you watch both price and quality.
When you spend your own money on someone else, you still watch the price, but you can only guess whether the purchase will satisfy the recipient.
When you spend someone else’s money on yourself, you care about quality but have little reason to economize.
When you spend someone else’s money on someone else, you have little incentive to control either price or quality.
The fourth category is how most public funds are spent.
Money is often wasted because government lacks the feedback that disciplines a household or a firm. When schools disappoint, just raise taxes. When roads deteriorate, pass a bond. If housing is unaffordable, simply create another subsidy. Agencies grow, contractors organize, and failure is recast as underfunding.
“More revenue” is not an analysis. It is a habit. A society that never asks whether existing funds are badly prioritized will keep buying the habit.
The questions are concrete. Are we treating every visible failure as proof that taxes are too low? Are we ignoring the value of leaving as much wealth as possible in the sector that actually builds houses, cars, food, software, and medical equipment? What if the government already has a great deal of money and spends it foolishly?
California makes the abstraction local. Proposals to tax accumulated wealth sit beside the usual menu of sales-tax increases, parcel taxes, bonds, assessments, and fees. Each measure arrives alone, tied to firefighters, schools, libraries, parks, roads, or clearing encampments. That is political marketing. It is not a budget.
Fraud is not merely a talking point either. In 2026, California’s attorney general charged 21 people in a Medi-Cal hospice scheme that billed about $267 million for services that were never provided: stolen identities, straw owners, and empty companies. The point is not that enforcement exists. It is that eligibility and billing were loose enough for empty companies to bill nine figures before the raid. Separate investigations have targeted waste and self-dealing in homelessness programs, including the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Audits have warned for years that the state spends heavily on homelessness without consistent outcome tracking. Those are not arguments against helping sick people or housing the destitute. They are arguments against writing a larger check to systems that cannot show what the last check bought.
The same logic applies to a billionaire tax. Most voters can tell themselves the bill is someone else’s. But large fortunes are not bags of idle cash. They are claims on companies, factories, equipment, securities, real estate, and new ventures. Capital finances expansion, research, and payroll. Moving it into the public budget has effects beyond inconveniencing the rich. Wealthy taxpayers have the option to leave. Several already have, such as Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Florida and Nevada); Peter Thiel (Florida); Travis Kalanick (Texas); and David Sacks (Texas) — with others, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jan Koum, Andy Fang, and Don Hankey, reported to have moved or taken steps to cut California residency before the January 1, 2026, deadline. Some of their companies stayed, but their tax domicile did not.
Politicians are driven by different incentives than investors. Reelection rewards visible programs. Programs create constituencies. Agencies protect budgets. Contractors chase contracts. Public-employee organizations lobby. Industries seek subsidies and rules that favor incumbents. The result is often a coalition of government and its vendors, not a tight focus on the basic services voters think they are buying.
The next dollar still requires an accounting. What was promised? What was spent? What was accomplished? What failed? Which agencies grew after they failed? Which outlays serve organized claimants more than the public?
Private firms obtain money, in the usual case, by persuasion. Government obtains it by law. That difference is why citizens should examine tax increases in a harsh light unless it is shown that the funds already collected are prioritized and working. The test is not whether a ballot measure names a popular cause. The test is whether the government that already holds the purse can be trusted with a larger one.
Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com. Read more of his essays there.
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