Do you think each person is responsible for enforcing federal laws? Like if you personally are not spending your own time and money to round up those in violation of federal statute then you're doing something wrong?
And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.
Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?
I'm wearing a ~$4000 MR-G today and I'm really happy with my choice. IMO the best thing about Casio as a brand is that they sell $15 watches and $8000 watches that do basically do the same things but appeal to different people. The existence of the higher end models doesn't diminish the utility or value of the classics. There's really something for everyone.
Photons reflected off of objects are not the actual objects. I wouldn't go so far as to say that sensing these is a particularly special way to know about things compared to hearing or reading about them. Further, many humans do not sense photons yet seem to manage to have perfectly fine working world models.
Generous is a strange choice of word - it's like implying the government is entitled to its own citizens' money, and we should consider ourselves lucky that they weren't taking as much of it.
I mean in the US constitution it is explicitly stated that interstate commerce is under the USG hat. So yes the government is entitled to it's citizens money when they cross the border.
Grey markets aren't the same black markets. Ideally the government would be omniscient, efficient, and benevolent so that it could properly regulate things to the benefit of the masses, but in practice it government isn't very responsive and in many cases has to consider different viewpoints on an issue. Even worse, regulations usually create winners and losers in a way where even if it's beneficial to change the regulation, whoever would lose out will automatically be opposed to the change. Americans - mostly working and middle class, not wealthy - bought 50+ billions of dollars of goods imported this way last year. The American people have voted with their wallets but the government is not responsive to their desires in this case.
I use it to do all the things that I couldn't be bothered to do before. Generate documentation, dump and transform data for one off analyses, write comprehensive tests, create reports. I don't use it for writing real production code unless the task is very constrained with good test coverage, and when I do it's usually to fix small but tedious bugs that were never going to get prioritized otherwise.
And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.