Those public employees are doing things like teaching schoolkids and collecting the garbage and making roads. If they aren't ludicrously overpaid (I've heard stories suggesting that some public employees are ludicrously overpaid, but what's the situation in general?) then what's actually happening is that corporate taxes are transferring ... well, maybe "wealth" sounds too specifically like money, so let's say "well-being" or "welfare" or something ... from beneficial owners of Californian corporations, to schoolkids and homeowners and road users and so forth.
Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but it's not quite the same as just taking business-owners' money and handing it to public employees.
(Much the largest expenditure in the California state budget is education. I think a high-school math teacher in California earns about $60k/year. Doesn't sound lavishly overpaid to me.)
I could reframe it "Every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar given to a real, flesh-and-blood human being" and the same facts point to the opposite conclusion.
I hope that the HN crowd isn't so ignorant as to think that corporations aren't made up of real people.
In other words, exactly what taxes are meant to be used for.
Now, of course it's possible that California is employing incompetent people to do those things, or that it's prioritizing them badly, or that its bureaucratic overhead is much bigger than it should be. But (1) Patrick didn't offer any sort of evidence for any of those things, or even say them, and (2) those things, if true, aren't problems with taxation but with other functions of government. (Unless they're incurable, so that anything paid for by taxes is inevitably going to be done badly; but, living as I do in a country where all sorts of important things are done quite competently using money raised from taxes, I find that difficult to believe.)