I'd guess more likely "pay as much as you can, and a bit more".

A bit like the tax authorities in any country, but even more callous and without public scrutiny.

Pay as much as we can sustainably demand, given the political realities of this time and place.

And you are right, that is exactly what all tax authorities do. It's important to get those political realities right.

tax authorities tax based on income or value at set percentages. cartels pretty much extract what they can arbitrarily.

That made me chuckle. At least as far as the US tax code goes, our decisions about who gets taxed what amounts are just as arbitrary, we just publish the amounts further ahead of time than the mafia tax collectors.

except, you know, the mafia doesn't use the money to build bridges and fund social programs.

Funny enough, almost all forms of the mafia in fact do social works projects. Their scale has historically not been large enough to build bridges though, however they almost all fund social programs to one degree or another.

The Italian Mafia both in NY and Italy have done that. Escobar did it. Al Capone did it. Etc. One can certainly debate their reasoning for doing it of course (eg buying goodwill so they can continue their crime spree, set up an underdog appeal and so on).

True. Even terror organisations like Daesh (ISIS) or Hamas use social programs to justify what they do and attract supporters.