I bet I’m at least as much of a leftist as you are, but taxes don’t pay for public infrastructure. In fact taxes don’t pay for anything. In the EU, taxes are paid in Euros, the same currency that the European Central Bank can create at will. Why would the European states need to collect taxes denominated in the currency the EU creates? They don’t.

Taxes have many purposes. Most importantly they define the area where a given currency is used (if you tax in a given currency, you force the people to earn it to be able to pay for it). But they also serve to disincentivize certain behaviours (tax on alcohol or tobacco), to remove money from the economy to prevent macroeconomic imbalances (if the state creates too much money without removing enough through taxes, there might be some problems), or simply to reduce inequality by charging more taxes to wealthier people or companies.

This is an important point, because it shifts the framing of taxes from a made up “we all need to contribute” mindset, to a more realistic “ok where do we want to remove money and by how much, what do we want to disincentivize, and how can we reduce inequality”. And it also shows that states can pay for things without the need to collect taxes for this, for example we saw this during COVID, when sizeable amounts of money were created to give an impulse to the economy and to the people who temporarily lost their income sources.