Everyone calls it a tax. This is something miners are choosing to do. You can argue it's not fair to miners who disagree, but they are by definition a minority, and the fact is, a majority of miners can choose how the protocol is set up, which inevitably affects a minority of dissenting miners. They choose how they want to spend their rewards and what kind of coin they want to have, and, what projects they want to support. ABC is currently the most used.
The reason it's different than a public school tax is that if the projects the miners support become lazy, money-hungry, and most importantly, unproductive, then no doubt they will not continue the practice. A better analogy would not be a mandatory tax on the public to fund public schools, but a mandatory tax on all parents of children using schools in a school district, voted on by at least a 2/3rds of a majority of parents. A tax that can and would be able to be changed, voted on, and altered by the parents if they felt their childten were not getting a good education at a particular school.
The reason that 2/3rds of parents would be forcing the other 1/3rd of parents to pay as well, even if they didn't want to, is because of the Free Rider problem.
In mining, anything you don't do to be competitive, means other miners have an advantage over you that can make you obsolete. Think of it like a parent who pays lots of money to support a good school, and that school has no restrictions on who can enroll and use its services. So, parents not paying anything can also send their kids to this good school, get a great education for free, and not pay anything. But in mining, it isn't just fellow parents, it is your competition. And the money your competition isn't spending on software development, is money they can use to invest in better miners, more hashpower, etc., and eventually, make you obsolete. To put it another way, miners who voluntarily fund software development are punished, because they give the benefits of that software to their competitors, who aren't voluntarily funding it.
Also, this IFP proposal is a free market proposal. A majority of miners choosing what software they support and disallowing a minority of their competitors to use it for free at their expense to compete with them, is, logical, economically rational, and by definition, part of the free market. The difference is, their incentives are aligned with the protocol succeeding and being used as a global peer-to-peer cash system, whereas before, Blockstream's incentives were on Bitcoin not working and for them to offer a solution in the form of unnecessary sidechain solutions.
Which brings me to my next point:
We already had a different free market solution to software development, and it was called Blockstream. They did what was economically, albeit not morally, correct. The only difference is their incentives were not aligned with ours. This is why Amaury talks about game theory so much, and why he has said many times that another Blockstream is the biggest threat to BCH. It all has to do with funding. That is why this IFP proposal is being proposed.
Now, the idea that a 2/3rds voting mechanism is fair, when it can so easily be manipulated by ill-intentioned BTC and BSV miners, is a fair and good reason alone, not to support this proposal as is. Another is the fact that there are so many users who may leave if this proposal is rammed down their throats, which I think would have terrible consequences. Remember: Users are part of the free market too, and I hope miners consider this carefully. I do not support the proposal as is for many reasons, many of which I haven't listed here. But let's understand the arguments properly.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/f5lv8a/addressing_the_erroneous_arguments_of_1_good/
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