| HN Mirror

Small thought experiment: Imagine an agricultural society where the nobility own the land, and serfs work it for subsistence wages only. The nobility largely don't work, and live lavish lifestyles supported by others. Nothing too unusual historically. In those circumstances, is maintaining the status quo the only morally correct choice, and any deviation from that "stealing?"

I don't think it's reasonable to measure a society's morality by its tax rates only or to draw an equivalence between taxes and theft.

It's true that minimal government and taxes worked well in the US's early history. But if you think about it, that was an agricultural society where the main source of capital, land, was practically free. It's not surprising that relatively pure capitalism worked OK then, but historically it seems to have worked out less well in almost all other circumstances.

These days a lot of capital is in stocks in global corporations, with barriers to entry measured in the billions of dollars. It's not as simple as moving to the frontier and finding your own plot of land.

I think an ideal society delivers broad-based prosperity and individual freedoms with a dynamic market economy. And tax policy should preserve incentives to work and invest efficiently. But if there is a conflict between broad-based prosperity and zero tax rates / income redistribution, like in the example society above, the former should definitely be chosen over the latter.

I think going the other way around, rather than leading to a capitalist paradise, will only lead to the rise of ideologies that advocate heavy-handed state control of the economy, probably to the detriment of everyone.