To be at that level you have to be making €300,000 a year, that level of taxation seems fair to me.
The true tax is called the "Tax Wedge". That's one of the reasons someone in Spain who makes 60k a year would be making 100k in the USA.
Saying that governments “hide taxes from workers by taxing the employer” is inaccurate at best. Taxation is shared, and there aren’t dedicated taxes for employers.
Hiding seems appropriate.
First one is fine with me. Second, no so much. Libertarian utopias are just that, and every single example of such has been a disaster.
US retirement social security and unemployment insurance and employer health plans may map onto european social security costs paid by employers, but if the cost to employers is variable wrt number of employees it would be fair to call it "paying taxes for employees" (and especially when you consider that in some continental language families "for" and "per" are the same word ;) because it has a very similar price elasticity effect on the labor market
Between all of that, that $100,000 in the US gets eaten up pretty quickly. If you live in, say, Wisconsin, your take-home will be between ~$57,000 and ~$45,000, depending on the number of family members you have on your health insurance plan.
You'll also get to enjoy another 5% in sales tax, and 1.65%/year in property tax.
So yeah, if you just look at the income tax rate, the US looks great. But when you account for all the other nickel-and-diming, you'll see that the net take-home for middle-class people is not so different. If you're upper-middle-class, making over $200,000, the US system starts getting skewed in your favor (Because of caps on SS, Medicare, because insurance costs are a flat fee, etc.)
That would allow the citizens to pick whatever job suits them because wages would be decoupled from there lives.
If this is done through the state or through some alternative anarchistic method I don't particularly care. We live in an age of ridiculous abundance, the fact people still die on the streets, die of starvation or die to to lack of healthcare is a crime against humanity.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
Switzerland has some of the highest taxes and highest wages in the world. Afghanistan has some of the lowest taxes in the world.
Clearly you must consider what you get for your money. Countries without functional police force, court system and IP protection don't tend to be popular with business