[cjbgkagh]

I'm in general against using the reductio ad absurdism to suggest we can't do something positive because there is an absurd inevitable point at which it stops being positive.

The point is, when navigating a highly dimensional design space it's ok to use a gradient descent / greedy optimization approach. If step 1 works then proceed to step 2, if step 1 did not work then we learned something and can pick a different step. Fix whatever went wrong in making the mistake with picking step 1 as the current top priority. It makes no sense to say that we can't make step 1 because step 1001 might be bad.

On the point of taxation, I personally dislike tax precisely because I think the money is not allocated in anything close to priority order. If it was we would be living in a vastly different world.