| These are 3 very different arguments. I will answer each: > A tax is a legitimate cost of a functioning economy as much as an electricity bill or a truckload of cement. That tax pays for the infrastructure which makes that same transaction possible in the first place. A tax can be used to pay for the infrastructure, and also pay many other things that are terrible and inefficient and immoral. Government spends a very small fraction of its budget on infrastructure, what about the rest? If only a fraction of the spending justifies the whole, then as long as you use some part for good you are entitled to rob the whole. Moreover, as time progresses, we find more and more ways to pay for infrastructure without taxes. Why is the infrastructure of the US is crumbling, and tax pressure is equal or higher? Its just not real that taxes are necessary for infrastructure, and that taxes are spent on infrastructure. > Ideally the cost of participation in the economy should scale linearly with how much excess benefit you derive. Total benefit minus the cost of being a functioning human in the society. This requires the insight that a person who has $1,000 of discretionary money every week has a lot more than ten times the excess benefit as someone who has just $100 discretionary every week. I dont see well the justification for 'excess benefit'. What is excess benefit and who decides? For me, goverment employee salaries are excess benefit, because many of them do actual damange and collect a paycheck. Can we tax those 100%?
The second part talks about the ability to pay: if someone has higher ability to pay a tax they should pay a higher tax. I dont think this is in everyones best interest either. If someone is earning a lot more because he produces more value, the tax will punish the productive fields, and prize the least productive fields. This means more people will work on the least productive, and less people on the most productive. The end result is worse wealth for the entire society. > Put another way, from the perspective of a rich person, it's in my interest to have everyone else in society well fed, free of disease, mentally healthy and able to work productively. The best way for rich people to ensure that is to require them all to pay a much larger proportion of taxes. It is not true that taxes are the way to help people advance. The greatest advances of human kind in quality of life and wealth happened in time of low government tax and intervention. Equating taxes to benefit is a grave mistake, one that reality has once and again shown extreme dangers. The society with the ultimate taxation, Socialist-communist, has shown greatest decline and misery of its people. |