Sometimes people do say, “Oh, I already do my bit. I pay taxes.” I just think that’s a misconception of what taxes are. Where there are so many goods that only are available—our ability to make an income is very heavily dependent on a very large number of public goods, goods that are provided by the government. So I’m only able to make the income I have because there is the military protecting the country, and because there are roads that allow me to get to work, and there’s a functioning legal system that will protect my property, and so on.

So it’s a kind of weird argument to me to think of taxes as charity, as if it’s something that’s this additional thing. You’ve earned this money, and then you’re losing some of it in order to be able to give to the government a hell of a lot of it. At least for a very significant fraction of those taxes, you’re paying for prerequisites of the money that you’re earning. So I think, actually, it’s only a kind of small proportion of—in general, the taxes that you’re paying are contributing to a well-functioning society that is precisely what allows you to make that money in the first place. Therefore I think that’s very different from charity.

I think there are some things that governments do that are more genuinely philanthropic, especially from countries like Sweden and the UK, the money that they send on overseas development aid. Sometimes that’s politically motivated, political games, and different countries vary in how much that’s true of their foreign aid spending. But at least to a significant extent that is philanthropic money. That’s just we’re trying to make other people better off because we have a moral duty to do so.

So at least that part of the money, I think, genuinely could count as charity, but most of it isn’t. Most of it is paying for things that just everyone benefits from, including the tax payer