I have studied this kind of thing for many years. There are damn few "public" services for which workable private alternatives are not feasible, but that's another subject.

Do the numbers. Tally up what the fire department, the water subsidies, the roads, the police, the courts, the libraries, and all the rest of the "essentials" cost, and see what part of the budget that entails. Feel free to do this at any level of government, although the higher up you go the worse it gets. The ratio is actually pretty decent at the city level, at least around here. This is why federalizing everything is a lousy idea.

You propose a law to cut off subsidies (real ones, not reductions in taxes) to corporations, agribusinesses and the like and I will march next to you with a sign supporting it.

You are still missing my main point. The philosophy that wealth belongs to the state* and not to those who earned it is responsible for more grief on this planet than almost anything else, because the inescapable corollary is that the citizen who produced the wealth also belongs to the state.

Hillary Clinton in a speech yesterday put it like this:

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

To really think about this statement properly requires that you analyze the meanings of the words "we" and "you" in this context.

Also, your entire post depends on the premise that Lileks isn't already spending a large portion of his income on taxes for all the things you mention. But you might have noticed that for many people, it's never enough.

*substitute your favorite sugar-coated euphemism here. "The public" is a good one. Hillary likes "the common good." "The people" used to work, but it started to sound too much like "the masses."