There’s nothing fair about taxes. From Brian Balfour at aier.org:
President Joe Biden recently trotted out the well-worn progressive complaint about the rich not paying their “fair share” of taxes. “It’s about time the super wealthy start paying their fair share,” Biden said on June 18 to a crowd in Pennsylvania. Claiming that billionaires “paid a lower rate than schoolteachers, than firefighters, probably anyone in this room,” Biden insisted the rich should “(J)ust pay your fair share, man.”
Missing from such conversations is just what exactly one’s “fair share” of taxes is, and how that is determined to be fair. That’s because the notion of any objective measure of taxes as being a “fair share” is a complete illusion.
Taxes are what citizens are compelled to pay in exchange for government services, like criminal justice, national defense, healthcare, education, and not to mention pork projects, war, and corporate welfare. Given this exchange of money for goods and services, one could plausibly compare the notion of a “fair share” of taxes to that of a “fair” or “just” price of commodities.
As Murray Rothbard points out in Power and Market: Government and the Economy, the notion of a “just price” was debated by ethicists and scholars for hundreds of years. Indeed, the history of this debate can be traced back to Aristotle, who described a “just exchange” as the trading of goods of like value while deeming as immoral the exploiting of arbitrage opportunities for profit. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th Century, held a similar view, while allowing for profit from selling an item for more than you acquired it.
Penalizing people for doing the right thing and making the almighty dollar, brilliant.
Innernets all over Mooch Obama talking about oppression from a multi-million dollar yacht near Greece.
Maybe go to another oceanfront mansion? (honk!)
You should be able to keep it all, it was your labor/brain that made it.