What you’re wishing for is to force your fellow man to donate to a cause you deem worthy. EU funds don’t come from nowhere - they are taken from citizens.
You go donate an hours wage a week instead; that’s virtuous.
Forcing others to fund wars is not moral. Neither is forcing others to fund mobile apps.
No one hinders you from donating to Signal if you wish, but if I am a Matrix user, do you want to use the violent force of the state to force me to fund Signal? It’s a moral absurdity.
Virtuos does not mean effective. I am of the opinion that we should have a democratic government that is able to spend some of their citizens money on projects deemed worthwile.
This is how public schools are funded in my country and I like that we fund them like this instead of private schools with fees that would exclude some families.
This model of funding works for a lot of public infrastructure and I doubt individual donations would make up for that.
I think it is critical for this public funding to be under democratic control. Otherwise it is definitely unjust.
In the end I think public funding / taxes is a way to bypass the tragedy of the commons (not sure if that is the right term here).
That's how taxes work, unfortunately you can't pick and choose to which causes they go.
That's why, in a democracy, you vote to elect your representative who will, hopefully, make sure your taxes contribute to causes you deem worthy. Be it open source, health services, education, ...
You are right - taxation is coercion and not virtuous. You are also right about representative democracy - the incentive is to have the state fleeze your neighbour as much as possible. For those working in the bureaucracy the incentive is to convince the boss you need a larger budget next year.
Certainly far from “love thy neighbour”.
Donate yourself, you can be a hundred times more efficient than EU bureaucracy, no exaggeration
Eh, but in reality no not really. The PyPy project is one example of a fantastic outcome for OSS (among others): they where heavily reliant on EU funding to get to the point they are now. VLC, glibc, Keepass, Kafka, tomcat and others have had EU funds for their security bounty programs.
My 10 EUR contribution to this via my taxes (simplistic and incorrect) is fine. Angry anti-tax anti-big-gov rhetoric involving wishful thinking whilst ignoring the reality we actually live in does little to advance your cause, and for lack of a better word makes you sound rather silly.
My fellow man sometimes wishes me to fund expensive wars too.
Wishing for how your taxes are spent is an aspect of democracy.