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Comment by lax4ever | Hacker News Reader

If the government can turn around and argue that Apple and Google, etc., are monopolizing the market for apps and that their rate of 30% is too high and unfair to developers, what on earth makes them think that they are suddenly entitled to an increasing percentage of a person's earnings simply because they have more than someone else?

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I don't understand your argument at all. Could you explain why you think the two are connected?

I think they are claiming it is hypocritical for a government to set its own tax rate while not allowing companies to set tax rates for developers on their platform.

This is pretty much the same argument as someone saying "Why is the government allowed to put people in prison, but when I lock someone up in my basement I'm apparently the bad guy?!"

The temporary or permanent cessation on an individuals rights based off their inability to follow the law (this is very general) has always been the purview of government. My original comment is more geared towards the idea that these individuals have, for the most part, put in the work to make something which earned them the money. Why exactly does the government think it is entitled to such high portions simply because the earner is making lots of it?

The government thinks it is entitled to whatever portions it has a democratic mandate to demand, regardless of whether the earner is making a lot or a little.

It has also always been the purview of government to tax the population/businesses whatever it can get away with, just as it has been the purview of government to regulate commerce for the benefit of its citizens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_competition_law#Rom...

Certainly it has been their purview, but to some of our representatives they place themselves on some sort of moral high ground in trying to impose increasingly larger taxes on those who have more simply because they have more. There is no argument that they are doing it, I don't understand why especially given the government's incredible inability to responsibly manage it.

> impose increasingly larger taxes on those who have more simply because they have more

You're free to disagree on the ethics, but hopefully you can accept the logic of it. If I may ironically steal a line from William Francis Sutton Jr., they tax the rich because "that's where the money is".

To be a little more nuanced, though, money has diminishing marginal utility, in the sense that $10 means less to a billionaire than to someone who is broke, and therefore if a tax system takes into account the perspectives of the people who hold the money, rather than the perspectives of the pieces of money themselves, it makes sense to tax not just as a fixed proportion of people's wealth, but to tax wealth above certain thresholds at higher rates.

Consider also that the median US household pays about $10k in taxes per year, and has a net worth of about $120k. That means that, just to tax billionaires proportionally (not progressively), there could be a wealth tax of 8% per year. Instead we tax income, which punishes people for working and rewards the idle rich.

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