You have rights to your property, I have rights to mine, and we through the constitution have rights to our property. The confusion stems from Republican confusion over pronouns. The taxes I pay are “my” obligations and “our” money.

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The problem with our current system is that people have only tacitly agreed to it. By and large they are too ignorant and too lazy to get it changed, but in my experience, they don’t like it.

Oh, the masses like hearing about taxing the “rich”. But that’s just simple envy and greed. I would not say it’s a good basis for a tax code.

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This is basically a contradiction in terms. Two-thirds of the federal budget goes to entitlements that are vastly underfunded. All any free and strong people want from the federal government is personal security military and diplomatic force, along with a set of minimal regulation of inter-state commerce, including a currency, along with wise state and local laws that support local order along with moral and family life. Most government programs are in fact bloated and inefficient, let alone the wicked meddling. It take ten to fifteen years to get bureaucratic approval to build a nuclear power plant.

Judging from the remarks in #12, you are basically a big-government socialist. The [little] “people’ in fact have minimal right to any free man’s property.

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Then one had better strive to be one of the few. Isn’t that one of the great advantages of a free economy within a system of equal opportunity? The Oprah Winfreys and Bill Gateses can join the few, because they are talented and they work hard.

And they provide jobs for so many people. And they give to those in need.

In our regulated economy, median income doesn’t mean very much, since the value of the dollar is constantly in flux.

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Imagine the difference all Reagan’s military spending would make for us today if we’d spent it for socialistic purposes then. A half a trillion brls. of oil unburned. Bullet trains and local public transportation infrastructure everywhere. A million gunshot victims still alive. Ten million felons with re-wound and re-written biographies in widescreen, extended editions. Healthier lives and a million tons less of human fat.

The people are in charge of government and we have the right to use it for any purposes we decide are appropriate and advantageous to the general welfare.

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But we don’t want to do it through our government. Our government can’t handle our own money better than we can and everyone who isn’t a socialist, anyone who can face facts, knows that.

The Constitution wasn’t written to put government in charge of every aspect of our lives. We are where we are because of hard work and innovation, and that is not promoted by the government.

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Income tax rates are effectively flat, whatever the schedule says, when income is flat — as in Estonia, perhaps. Progressivity matters only when incomes are massively different.

What good is economic growth when it all accrues to few and median income declines?

I don’t believe wealthy people have to take assets out of production to protect them from inheritance taxes (which affect very few estates.) There are all kinds of legal vehicles for carrying assets across the generations. Except where a family might want to sell off a private company or sell land or minerals it acquired in the 1930’s, for example, there’s not much that interferes with their property. Even so, speaking as someone who has enjoyed the benefit of the transfer of a family business over three generations, I don’t see the harm to society — or to the heirs — in confiscatory taxation, which is better than thoughtless waste, at least.

Republicans say, “You give your money to the government, if you want, but don’t take mine.” My answer is that I don’t need to divest property unilaterally and there’s nothing immoral about wanting to tax you the same as me. Also, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically harmful about the progressive personal income tax. In fact, government spending can generate economic activity that increases income as much as the taxes which finance it. Businesses are eager to incur expenses for productive purposes, and the people should be too, if they wish to do so through their government..

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