The power to tax is the power to destroy

John Marshall.

Taxes can destroy anything. This is the great danger, the danger of killing the goose who lays the golden egg. If the government takes too much of the profit, enterprising people go elsewhere, underground if necessary. If the ones who control the toll roads are too greedy, people find alternate routes.

One of the fine arts of government is to find out where this boundary lies, and to fall just short of it.

Conversely, if a government does not collect taxes, it is unable to perform it's basic function, which in neo-liberal (AKA classical liberal) terms, to defend the rich. Or, in Keynesian liberal economic practice, to prevent the economy from throwing itself into depresssion.

People argue "Why should my tax dollars go to pay some lazy welfare bum?". The government also doesn't care about some "lazy welfare bum". The reason welfare exists is to put money into the economy, so that the economy may upswing again during a recession.

The taxes the government collects may seem to be prohibitively large, but they go into things that will protect the money one does have.