First exit

Taxes are paid to help, and only the Public Administration is capable of managing that help

The solidarity argument:

you have to help cover expenses that either benefit everyone or benefit those most in need,

is very powerful because humans are intrinsically solidary beast. Whether they are so by nature; religiously, because love is repaid with love; as a result of an Oriental-style shame within the group; out of an adaptive selfishness in the hope that this help will be returned, —I repeat, whether it is for any of these or other reasons— is irrelevant here. It is an empirical fact that the zoon politikon likes to help and be helped.

Solidarity is cool.

Well: depending on who preaches it and manages it, of course.

In the Western world, misunderstood rationality —let's call it "scientism"— and the progressivism, today wokeism— have invested more than two thousand years in expelling the Church, first from the State and then from Society —and They are still at it—, all with the (apparently) laudable aim of building a secular and therefore free-thinking state. And They have done the same with what the Church used to preach, religion, because it only served to generate weak and fearful subjects of an eschatological judgement. As if religion as a religious fact, as a religious experience, were an invention of fanatics and not what it really is: a defining feature of the human being. If there are men and women, there is religion —and read with the logical value of a biconditional. We do not need —They said— anyone in the name of God to give lessons in morality on Earth; and still less do we need anyone in holy dress to give charity. Let the ecclesiastics take their pious and whitish hands off the management of charity on the basis of love and virtue!, which We, adorned in suits and Chanel dresses, will manage more efficiently and on the basis of criteria of objective need.

It was that simple (and daring) to replace religious morality and inquisitorial puritanism with secular morality and the puritanism of social networks; how the believer fearful of the rage of God was replaced by the servant —though they call him a citizen— fearful of the force of the State; and, finally, how "salvation by charity" was replaced by "ballot by subsidy". Behind these two there may or may not lie charity; but if it is the case that behind the two lies this thing called charity, only the second one is cool —quasi a paranormal mystery except for Nietzsche.

That solidarity that is cool —the one They preach and manage but not the one that others manage and preach—, is cooler when it is accompanied by an argument of need and efficiency:

You should not only help because you want to, you should help out of necessity and out of need through Me, making Me, the Public Administration, the collector and distributor of that help. Because if I, the Public Administration, don't do it, nobody will; and, of course, if anyone could do it —which they can't— they wouldn't be able to do it as efficiently as I do —because I am the best of the best.

If you accept this story —Chinese or not— typical of the charlatans who sell hoaxes rather than of the storytellers who propagate illusions, then you are left with that first exit from Münchhausen's trilemma which says that every explanation is based on axioms or indisputable principles, just as Euclidean geometry is based on Euclid's indisputable five postulates...