The state claims to have sole and exclusive possession of the collective interest, and does so quite plausibly since it is funded from expropriations given under the threat of coercive force. That is to say, because the state's income is only provided unwillingly it is invulnerable to donor influence. Indeed, notoriously and even in democracies, taxpayers have little control over the way their taxes are spent and are frequently but powerlessly dissatisfied. By contrast organisations or institutions funded from willing gifts may be accused of self-serving bias in proportion to the satisfaction of their funders.
But the truth is that the state is as much a vehicle of sectarian interest as any more readily identified pressure group. As already noted, taxation must be coerced, otherwise it would go unpaid. This fact implies that the cost of government services exceeds their market value, in other words the price that individuals would willingly pay to achieve the same ends. From this it necessarily appears that the principal beneficiaries of government spending must be the state's employees, considered as a co-operating group, and that the system is optimised in their interest.