[_uhtu]

This is a terrible argument.

It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.

[slowmovintarget]

There's no world where the government takes money from taxpayers and doesn't just turn around and spend it. Often this spending is several orders of magnitude more wasteful than private individuals spending their own money, because government agencies have extremely weak incentives to spend efficiently. They spend, run out of money, and just stop whatever they were doing because, oops, out of money until the next budgeting cycle.

Value is destroyed by taxation, money is just a proxy. We spend on government because there are things we need that only government can do. Wealth transfer is not one of them.

[namlem]

Value is destroyed by deadweight loss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1