So the argument is basically: because taxes, and only taxes, paid for something somewhere, it should be free for everybody everywhere?

Ah wait, you're somebody else. Why the somewhat unhinged attack on Europe? Because Europe is getting US tech for free?

30 years ago, one of the things we were all naively hoping for was that a globally connected network would help to reduce the tribalism, obsolete these "American money" and "European bits" and "Chinese protocols" ideas and stop all the cross-border fighting over what's mine and what's yours. When a piece of software has contributors from 50 countries, how could it "belong" to one country? Obviously we are in an even worse spot, global cooperation wise, now than we were in the 90s.

I've seen this work in certain situations, CERN and the LHC for example (I was on a data team for a detector). Everyone was driven by the science, where you came from didn't matter. With that said, and this part is going to be inflammatory potentially, people who are fear and tribal/in group driven are likely never going to be swayed (and building the mental model up via comments to properly contextualize this is beyond the scope of this thread). Tech doesn't fix people problems.

It might have been a bit naive, and very much reliant on a more open, more liberal, and less neo-liberal, international order than we have right now. Greed and power are conducive to such ideals.

Indeed, it appears they are upset that "the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value" from American open source spend in some way.