As we just noted, tax-accounting costs must be borne both by businesses and by the revenue-collections agency. The total cost to the private sector must include the added accounting expenses for businesses and therefore significantly exceeds $200 billion. Furthermore, the government's costs of collection and administration cannot be returned to taxpayers; hence the net funds available for services to taxpayers must fall short of $200 billion.
Even if the full cost of taxation could somehow be expended on services to taxpayers, we cannot assume that the value of those services is equivalent to that cost. Since public-sector services are usually different in kind from those that the private sector would have provided, the quantities of those services cannot be directly compared, just as we cannot compare apples versus oranges. Furthermore, the $200 billion price tag of the public-sector services is irrelevant, since economic value is determined not by cost but by utility (pp. 4.4:34-40). In assessing the relative utility of those services to consumers, we should recall that the price system of the free market constantly directs production toward maximizing marginal utility to consumers (as well as minimizing the subjective costs of labor, time preference, and risk). Any attempt to subvert that system, by extracting funds coercively and allocating them to different goals, must inevitably entail diminutions in subjective value to consumers.

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