I'm interestingly in agreement with you. A learned understanding of our monetary system [1] makes it clear that taxes are primarily about freeing resources that the state can use to provision itself, not raising money. In such a system it is much easier to point out unintended consequences as well as understand what makes a tax effective or not, assuming one chooses to understand it.

The question then is only how much government you want, which is a political question.

[1] relevant to the UK, but equivalent systems exist in any monetarily sovereign country: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4890683