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Comment by dantheman | Hacker News Reader

I always find it interesting that people who have extra money won't just donate to the government. Instead, they advocate the government take it from them and from others. It's not a coherent position.

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It is a coherent position: they only want to give up their money if enough other people do as well to accomplish their goals. It's a classic public goods problem, if you assume they feel that everyone would be better off with the additional government funding.

"they only want to give up their money if enough other people do as well to accomplish their goals" -- fair enough. No need for them to resort to force though.

I don't understand how you could've possibly come to this conclusion. The net effect of one rich dude donating money to his government is not the same as the net effect of all rich dudes being taxed. So there's no logical contradiction.

It's a good thing - like the elder brothers taking care of their younger siblings. If one does take the effort all of the elders should do it - IMHO it's a position of consistency. We don't talk about the younger ones being lazy or such, just simply about the elder ones taking care when they younger ones need help.

In this case, he is demanding that it be taken from those who had the temerity to earn it to further the political goals of those who did not.

And EUR 500,000 is hardly a "fortune" - that's about GBP 400,000 which is the price of an ordinary family home in the South-East of England, or the price of a two-bedroom flat in central London. So effectively, this is an upper-class heir to a family fortune advocating higher taxation on the middle-classes and professionals.

How much do you want to bet that the people proposing this are worth at least one or two orders of magnitude more than EUR 500,000. To quote from the article "The group say they have more money than they need", and very few people with a net worth of just above eur 500,000 fall into that category.

44 people have signed a partition to propose a tax law that will negatively affect 2.2 million people, am I the only person who sees something very odd with that. This is nothing but a bullshit PR move by some rich heirs to try to buy some good will.

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