>raising taxes is unpopular and tends to cause people to get voted out of office.

This is missing the point. If you got rid of taxes altogether it would reveal what really is being propped up tax money as opposed to actually being valuable enough to exist on its own.

>complixated entity made up of literally millions of people all of whom have different motivations and incentives

Which is why it's important to get the big incentives correct. Otherwise one of these actors will waste resources since expecting people to do the right thing without incentives does not scale.