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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

In a healthy, civic-conscious society, it is understood that those who have help those who don't and that this is a moral and ethical good. What we are seeing now with the profound selfishness of the modern American civic system (in some social quarters on the left, in most social and economic quarters on the right) is a breakdown of that mutual understanding and spirit of civic duty. Which leads to those who have incomprehensible amounts of money being defended by those with merely a lot of money against those with no money by characterizing the notion of ensuring a basic standard of living for those with no money as something like "handouts" instead of the mutual cooperation to keep a working society that people, not just rich people, actually want to live in.

There is a statement about the need to get over oneself somewhere in there, but finding it is an exercise for the reader.

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Something you didn't touch on is that there may be a different viewpoint on whether people are getting "handouts" based on assumed counterfactuals. Say one person makes $30K and another makes $5M. What is the "fair" amount of tax and who is getting a handout? The rich person may think "society provides people with $10K of support per capita, so if I pay more taxes than that, it's generous and if someone pays less, they're getting a handout". The person making $30K may reason that "if it wasn't for society catering to the privileged, nobody would make millions, so nearly all the excess over the average income is a handout if not paid in taxes". It all depends on where you anchor your assumption of what is deserved.

Recall that for someone "making" $5M per year, the majority of income that high is inevitiably extractive and exploitative and comes from ownership and power, not the output of their actual work. One could argue if they deserve any of it beyond their actual real wages at a fairly evaluated rate, which might cap out at $1M in a democratic society. FDR proposed a 100% marginal tax rate on the highest earners, his opponents argued him down to something in the 90s, spawning the most productive period in US history.

I don't necessarily find it convincing that the benefit from living in society to an individual is capped, but on the other hand, I don't find it convincing that the benefit from some individual to society is capped either.

We may consider perhaps one can only truly earn $1M. But, what if someone has an idea that benefits a billion people to the value of a dollar each? You may not think, for instance, that Facebook in particular qualifies, but the point is, it seems to me possible in principle. Or, what if someone invents something that saves a million lives? You can't put a dollar amount on that, maybe, but surely it's worth more than $1M, because courts put that much value on just one life frequently.

All in all, the existing situation, where taxes are a percentage of what you make kind of makes sense to me. It is consistent with believing that living in society is a multiplier.

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