Voter-Approved Taxes

As explained by Mancur Olson, in his The Logic of Collective Action, the Swedish economist Kurt Wicksell (1851-1926) believed that

". . . the only just method of financing the state services was to require that virtually every appropriation of government funds obtain a unanimous vote. If a proposed expenditure could not, under any distribution of the tax burden, command unanimous support in parliament if should be rejected. Otherwise some citizens would be forced to pay taxes for a government service that they did not want at all or did not want enough to help pay for it."

Such a system, along with user-fees instead of taxes, and the provisioning of goods by private companies, would all be improvements over the current system which is just as likely to provide services that state officials and their friends want as what the public wants.