[McDyver]

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, ...

[jeofken]

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

[orf]

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.

[jeofken]

Nothing silly about having principles.

[orf]

If those principles and the way you articulate them are obviously silly then yes there very much is