One of the useful things science fiction taught me was to look for where the magic comes in to a fictional world. E.g., travel at sub-light speeds makes it inconvenient to write about interstellar empires, so the author creates a magic FTL drive covered over with science doubletalk.
The magic in your fantasy is infinite cognitive capacity. As if each person could carefully look at the list of hundreds of millions of taxpayers across federal, state, county, and city jurisdictions, extract all the information they needed, fairly contextualize it in the total economic and social environment, and then respond appropriately when they meet somebody new over dinner. All the while managing to live their lives, do their work, raise their kids, etc, etc. And that's not even counting the labor of figuring out the correct amount to pay for each function of government, which on its own is an impossible task for a single individual.
In practice, with human cognitive limitations, what we'd have is chaos, parasitic behavior, and a race to the bottom. Which is why we have a system where the free rider problem is instead solved by having a variety of locales one can move to so that individuals can choose the sort of public investment approach they'd like to live under. If you would like to live in 19th-century conditions, you can buy a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere for approximately nothing.
19th-century conditions wouldn't exist in my scenario. None of the knowledge gained over the last century would be lost. And therefore living standards would be high, and grow higher.
I am still thinking about your comment regarding cognitive capacity. I believe that this is something the media could solve, just by normal reporting.
I want to emphasize that success here isn't measured by the number of "free riders" that exist. I think that success is simply that enough people contribute enough funds to prevent anarchy and do little else. And if you're the CEO of a sizable company, it's not hard to see how anarchy would ruin everything...
The magic in your fantasy is infinite cognitive capacity. As if each person could carefully look at the list of hundreds of millions of taxpayers across federal, state, county, and city jurisdictions, extract all the information they needed, fairly contextualize it in the total economic and social environment, and then respond appropriately when they meet somebody new over dinner. All the while managing to live their lives, do their work, raise their kids, etc, etc. And that's not even counting the labor of figuring out the correct amount to pay for each function of government, which on its own is an impossible task for a single individual.
In practice, with human cognitive limitations, what we'd have is chaos, parasitic behavior, and a race to the bottom. Which is why we have a system where the free rider problem is instead solved by having a variety of locales one can move to so that individuals can choose the sort of public investment approach they'd like to live under. If you would like to live in 19th-century conditions, you can buy a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere for approximately nothing.