I think the point being made here is not that people should work against their own "rational self interest" but that paying taxes in your local community to support infrastructure, policing, education, public services, public health, and so on is actually directly in your own self interest. But people have this idea that taxes benefit nobody so we work scrupulously to avoid them.
One of the biggest socialist programs of wealth redistribution in the US is actually our highway and road system, where we pay hundreds of billions of dollars from cities to smaller municipalities and counties to maintain a system of public roadways by which those smaller municipalities can reach larger cities by car. Absolutely nobody complains about that. So clearly paying taxes on that is beneficial. And that suggests that paying taxes on other things is beneficial.
> and so on is actually directly in your own self interest. But people have this idea that taxes benefit nobody so we work scrupulously to avoid them.
But my point is that it's not. It's in your interest to have those things but not in your interest to pay for them. Having government programs such as roads is beneficial. Paying for roads out of your own pocket is not. So we should expect to see people dodge taxes wherever it's practical to do so.
This has implications for how you design a taxation system. For example, there is an optimal sales tax rate that is neither significantly lower than your neighbors nor significantly higher—one where the inconvenience of shopping somewhere else is higher than the cost of shopping locally.
The only way to get around the problem is to make receiving the government services contingent on paying the tax. Vehicle registration fees are a good example, as are property taxes. If roads are paid for out of a tax that you can't avoid paying if you own a car, then using the government-provided infrastructure is contingent on paying for it and it's in your self interest to do so.
Sales taxes are particularly problematic in this regard because the people who pay them are often not the people who benefit from the programs paid for. (Though this is less true in small isolated towns than it is in large Metro areas.)
This is entirely a matter of opinion whether you believe that a democratic process should be able to direct individuals' funds to public works projects or not. I believe that it is. But when you assert one way or the other you're challenging an axiom.
So sure you could completely redesign the taxation system, or you could work with people to convince them that paying taxes actually confers benefits.
One of the biggest socialist programs of wealth redistribution in the US is actually our highway and road system, where we pay hundreds of billions of dollars from cities to smaller municipalities and counties to maintain a system of public roadways by which those smaller municipalities can reach larger cities by car. Absolutely nobody complains about that. So clearly paying taxes on that is beneficial. And that suggests that paying taxes on other things is beneficial.