Okay, sure. But what does the difficulty of taxing something have to do with the difficulty of building a single central authority that makes good decisions for a population without their consent?
Passing laws is not the difficult part, any government can do that :)
Right -- in most cases through a voluntarily elected representative democracy, or something similar. In the US, a decent portion of these taxes are even imposed by individual state laws, not just through the federal government. This is, maybe not the complete opposite of totalitarianism, but it's pretty close to the opposite.
But you might be missing the point of what I'm saying. If you want to move to a totalitarian system where we centralize all decision-making power, it's not enough to find a couple of things we all agree on. You have to be right nearly all of the time.
Go back to the Right to Repair analogy I made earlier. There are generally accepted best practices for most devices (for example, I don't want to be able to overcharge the battery until it explodes). But just because we can think of a couple of examples of this, it doesn't necessarily follow that a single company should control everything I can do with my device. Why? Because my concern isn't that Apple or Google will never get anything right, it's that their priorities won't in general align with mine, and that if something goes wrong, I won't have a recourse to correct the problem (The Defense in Depth analogy).
The same concerns are present with any system of government. If you want to remove user/citizen agency, you need a consistent framework or set of tests that can be applied to every decision you make. You need a way to make a decision and, without getting the consent or input of the general populous, figure out whether it's in their best interests. That's the difficult, impossible task.
Not passing the law; not quieting the companies that opposed it. That stuff might not be trivial, but we know how to do it. We do it all the time. We don't have any idea of how to objectively determine whether or not a random policy is in the public's (or an individual's) best interest without their input.
And it's worth noting that even in drug policy, even representative democracies struggle with this. In the US, we had prohibition, which was an attempt to say, "come on, alcohol is obviously bad for society". That failed pretty spectacularly. Now we do cigarette taxes, but we haven't gone so far as to actually ban cigarettes, even though we're all pretty much agreed it would be better if they stopped existing. And more recently, we're starting to see states decriminalize marijuana, which is a clear example of citizens/states rejecting a centralized "common-sense" decision about what was good for them.
Corrections like this are examples of the system working as intended.
You're looking at this through a government vs. corporation regulatory lens that I'm not really following. I'm arguing that voluntary delegation of a decision making process is different than involuntary delegation, and that preserving individual freedom doesn't mean you can't ever delegate a decision to someone else. I don't understand how cigarette taxes relate to that idea.
