Why does one official decide where 100 million Ft of your taxes go as gifts?

Rationale

Strip the euphemism and state what this line is: a statutory entitlement to a discretionary public-donation budget placed at the personal disposal of the President of the Republic. Act CX of 2011 on the legal status and remuneration of the President of the Republic establishes a separately budgeted appropriation, within the Köztársasági Elnökség chapter, over which the President holds personal spending authority for "public-interest offerings and donations."[^1] The Sándor-palota publishes the recipient, purpose, and amount of each donation within fifteen days of the President's written commitment[^1] — disclosure that documents the mechanism rather than disciplining it. Run the line against the three questions. Voluntariness: charitable giving is the paradigm case of an activity that can be financed voluntarily, at a scale set by the actual preferences of actual donors. There is nothing the holder of this budget can give to a good cause that a private donor cannot give to the same cause; the only thing the line adds is that the gift is made with other people's money. Calculation: there is no market price, no objective optimum, and no aggregator of subjective valuations that tells the state which causes a discretionary donation budget should support — the allocation is, by construction, the personal preference of one officeholder. Public-choice exposure: the line concentrates a visible benefit (the named recipient organisations, and the goodwill the donating officeholder accrues) while spreading the 100 millió Ft cost diffusely across every taxpayer. The line fails all three. It is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition — the Fundamental Law does not require that the head of state command a personal philanthropy budget — and not a protective response to involuntary harm. It is the subjective allocation of public resources by a single political officeholder. The seen here is small and sympathetic: 100 millió Ft distributed to causes that are, in any given year, very likely genuinely worthy. The unseen is the structure. Every Ft of this budget was first taken, involuntarily, from a wage-earner — and that wage-earner has a specific family, a specific tax burden, and specific things they can no longer do for the people they love. A worker at the roughly 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage[^4] contributes to general revenue through the payroll wedge and through ÁFA on every purchase; some small slice of that contribution funds a donation budget whose recipients that worker did not choose and may never hear of. The honest description is not "the President supports good causes." It is: the state takes money from a working household by compulsion and hands the disposal of it to an officeholder to give away as that officeholder sees fit. If the cause is worthy, the worker — left with the 100 millió Ft spread back across the tax base — can give to it directly, or not, as that worker judges. The reductio is the line's own logic taken seriously: if it is legitimate for the state to tax a household in order to let an officeholder make charitable gifts on the household's behalf, there is no principled stopping point — every officeholder could be granted a philanthropy budget, and the household's own giving would be displaced by giving chosen for it. The line does not survive its own extension.