That is silly. It's like punishing a child who eats too much candy by restricting his total caloric intake. He will continue to eat as much candy and simply stop eating regular meals. (Just look at our crumbling transportation infrastructure…)
You have to punish in a manner not fungible with the desired behavior: in this example, take away toys; in the case of taxes, take away votes.
A government isn't a child, deserves none of the same considerations. And it's crime is mass murder.
I'm happy to see it starve, I'm obligated to try to starve it.
Replace "child" with "garden" and "sweets" with "weeds". If you try to starve the weeds taking over your garden by not watering your garden, you'll have only weeds left.
You need to attack the root of the problem, be it literally roots, or by voting warmongers out of office.
You can't vote warmongers out of office. There are no such candidates.
Their initial example is taxes (and tax cheats). This is a good example for my point...
Paying taxes isn't morally righteous. Our government takes some large fraction of those and spends it on killing people. Killing them far away, with little justification (much of it absurd), no transparency or accountability, and what we have found out about all this is that it's all abominable.
If I could figure out how to cheat on my taxes, I would. I'd feel obligated to do so.
Their second example is hardly better, though it seems that way at first glance (and note how all of these seem simple at first glance). A young man saved a woman in a flood. And his gamble paid off. That time. He almost certainly risked much to save her, and those gambles rarely pay off. Much of the time, acting quickly without thinking gets people hurt and killed. Usually many more are hurt or killed than would have been if slow, deliberative thinking had delayed such rescue.
Then it veers into situations, where the agents are all mindless algorithms, and only the programmer/researcher/experimenter gets to decide what "beneficial results" means.
This reduces everyone in such a model to mindless automatons, where only the results of those in charge are considered. Is that what they want to turn us into? Maybe they can find some secret psychological button to make your concerns melt away, so that the only thing worried about are the wants of those who manage to find and poke the button? This should worry people.