Whenever public funds are made available for frowned upon projects they are described as taxpayers' money. The phrase rightly suggests that public funds are collected for the good of society, and so should not be spent wastefully or arbitrarily. But the phrase is rarely neutral. Taxpayers' money is misused, thrown away, squandered, wasted or cast at its unworthy objects.
The expression also hints at something more. It invites us to think of tax payers as individuals who still have claims over the money they pay in tax even when it is aggregated in the hands of the government. It also suggests that taxation is an imposition that we can rightly feel curmudgeonly about.
When I hear the phrase roll from critics' lips, I imagine taxpayers as prune faced and laser lipped, like geese cackling and snapping when some of their grain is taken away, or like children watching with beady eyes as their mother cuts the cake, ready to howl if their slice of the cake is the smaller half by a crumb or two.
Underneath the phrase usually lies a view of life in which the market is a sacred site. The free market in which individuals can buy and sell without interference is the foundation of political freedom. The goal of human happiness and of social endeavour is imagined in economic terms as wealth and position attained by competing in the free market. The welfare of the society is identified with its wealth, regardless of the equality of distribution or the wellbeing of the least advantaged of the citizens.
From this perspective anything that distorts the free working of the market is a threat to individual freedom and ultimately to society. Taxation is seen as a distortion of the market because it limits our choice to buy and sell as we wish. So it is endorsed only grudgingly for securing things, like infrastructure, that the market cannot provide by itself. This is why the conversation about tax is often like geese hissing at the farmer who sets aside some of their grain for weaker birds.
The insult of taxation is added to by the injurious ways in which its proceeds are used. Public funding of non-profit community organisations for their work with the disadvantaged is also seen as regrettable on these premises. By definition they are less efficient than commercial organisations because the latter are disciplined by a free and competitive market. I