I'm arguing what I wrote, which is that if there were a single big tax rather than a lot of small ones, people's efforts to avoid it would tend to produce more dramatic distortions in how we live. I wasn't saying anything one way or the other about the effectiveness of such a tax as a way of collecting revenue, or how effective current taxes are at that.

Sigh. I wonder if forums train one to write verbosely. When I say exactly what I mean, and no more, I always seem to end up having to produce the macroexpansion of it in the grandchild. I wonder if one eventually starts to anticipate this.