“Since there’s no precise definition of what is someone’s “fair share” of taxes, it would have to determined through democratic discussion and compromise. First, we’d have to collectively decide what is ‘fair’.”
I think that when the very nature of an issue makes dissidents a tiny minority forever, it is wrong to let the majority impose their tyranny upon them.
Let me explain what I mean with a similar case: transsexuals are a tiny minority (roughly 0.005% of the population, according to some studies), and we can expect them to continue to be a tiny minority. Today, individuals and cultures differ in how thew view transsexuals and how they treat them. If we were to apply “democracy” to decide whether transsexuals should be allowed to undergo surgery, to change their names, or to marry people of the same sex they were assigned at birth, it would be very easy that a majority of bigots make the lives of transsexuals miserable. The progressive and liberal answer to that is to acknowledge that it is nobody’s business what consenting adults do with their own bodies, what names they choose for themselves, or who they marry. In other words, we don’t allow democracy to restrict certain individual rights.
The super-rich are and will always be, by definition, a tiny minority. If the rest of us are allowed to impose our “democratic” decisions upon them, you can expect the very concept of “rich” to disappear altogether. It would become predatory taxation, and radical redistribution of wealth.
Would that be right? Does anyone have a right to restrict how much money another individual earns by legitimate and non-violent means? I’m inclined to answer “no”.
Let’s leave aside fortunes that were built upon slavery, colonialism, violence, fraud or other illicit means. Those are immoral, and in those cases I definitely support confiscation, redress and redistribution. What moral justification is there to tell someone who is either very creative, very smart, gifted, a brilliant inventor or investor, or simply works much harder than anybody else, that they cannot keep the rewards they earn? How can society expect those individuals to keep on working and producing at a rate that is much higher than average, receiving proportionally much less than others in return?
