"In theory at least, the idea of taxes is to use our societies collective excess money to pay for things that we as a society would benefit from."

This is one of the alternatives I was thinking about. Unfortunately, the way our current politics are, there's no guarantee that our system would actually allocate that money to what we actually need any better than the billionaires are. Given that the needy are a small minority, it's possible they fair even worse in a democratically controlled funding system, especially if the larger segment want more for themselves and have more influence.