Is percentage progressivity now a Myth?

This seems like a coherant philosophy, althought I totally disagree. My POV comes from the Founders[ul][li]Wealth is created by individuals and it belongs to them.[]Note that wealth survives changes in government. E.g., George Washington didn’t lose his land just because British rule was overthrown. Krupp Steel didn’t go out of business after the Nazis were replaced.[]It’s impossible to say what how much wealth one might have had under some other government. However, if one wants to try, one must consider all the economic harm done by government. It’s not so obvious in the US, because our government is pretty good. But, consider the poverty being caused in Zimbabwe by its current government. [/li]
Can the Mugabe regime justify ownership of private property because it wouldn’t exist without them? It’s the exact reverse. The populace could more easily justify ownership of the government’s property, because the government has been so awful. Unfortunately, the government has no property of its own, so it cannot make good the harm it has done.In short, I don’t agree with government ownership, and I don’t believe this approach is a good way to justify it morally. I think government confiscation would be better justified by showing that it worked, if it did work.[/ul]

Sorry, but you have failed to make yourself clear here, at least to me.

In the case of dividends, the shareholders own the company. Therefore the intial tax on corporate earnings represents a tax on the shareholders having earned the money. When the money is transferred to their private bank accounts, it is considered as if they earned it again, and they are taxed again. It is as if every time you move money from one bank account to another it is considered as if you have earned the money and must pay a new tax.

Do you have an analogous example of double taxaation? If you do, please whip it out.

Thanks xenophon41, although it’s unjustified in this case. This thread is full of people making good points.

But if Washington had lost his land, the wealth would still have survived. Wealth can survive changes in government. Prior patterns of ownership of wealth can too, but these are two different things.

I disagree with the first bit - as I expect most of the lefties (cf jshore’s post) in this thread do. Wealth is created by the interactions of individuals within an institutional framework: individuals can create little wealth by themselves, even if not assailed by the marauding hordes. As for “it belongs to them”, we disagree at a fairly deep level I suspect. To me, property rights and inequality are but instrumentally good things. For me, it is departures from equality that require justification.

A counterexample for IzzyR on the double tax front: environmental or congestion taxes. A “tax on a tax” is usually pretty bad news, except where the initial tax corrects a market failure. If you had (say) a fuel tax to charge for environmental damage, road use or congestion, it would be fine to levy a sales tax on top of the tax inclusive price of fuel or goods that use fuel.

I’m not sure what you mean here. Are you saying this is or is not a comparable example (to dividends) of double taxation that is being overlooked?

Yes, they are. The latter is what I meant.

That’s probably true in general, but there are exceptions, such as the Cali Drug Cartel and other organized crime. Even honest businesses provide much of their own security in certain areas. Consider the shop-owner who keeps a gun behind the counter.

It’s one thing to hold this position from an absolute moral POV. If it’s your axoim, I cannot dispute it. However, I do not agree that all of society is entitled to my wealth because all of society contributed to it.

Here’s an example. A sister company of the one I worked for was required to pay bribes in order to be able to manufacture their product in Boston. Can Boston claim a share of the company’s wealth because they protected the company from the “marauding hordes”? Boston was one of the marauding hordes.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by december *
This seems like a coherant philosophy, althought I totally disagree. My POV comes from the Founders[list][li]Wealth is created by individuals and it belongs to them.[/li][/quote]

What Hawthorne said.

[quote]

[li]Note that wealth survives changes in government. E.g., George Washington didn’t lose his land just because British rule was overthrown.[/li][/quote]

Well, you might want to ask some of the descendants of Tories living in Canada. Remember how when the U.S. instituted the law (Helms was one of the coauthors) trying to prevent citizens from other nations from trading with Cuba by declaring it stolen prpoerty, two MPs in the Canadian Parliament introduced a bill there to do a similar thing in regards to property taken from them in the Revolutionary War.

Of course, we might point out that in certain cases like the American Indians, the nationalization of industries in Cuba and other countries, wealth has been transferred.

Finally, as Hawthorne has noted, the fact that a right to private property seems to be a useful thing for a society to have does not mean that it stands independent of the government system. The fact that even major changes in government often try to respect that private property does not mean it is a right that transcends government.

I’m not arguing that government should own all property. I am just arguing that believing too much in private proerty rights as being inherent and completely outside the control of government leads to lots of logical contradictions.

Note added in preview: I don’t really understand what your Boston example pertains to. And, I’ll reiterate that we are not arguing that there should not be private proerty, we are just arguing that the contribution of each person to our common welfare is something that is within the perview for a democratic government to decide and there one can’t try to claim higher ground on the basis of “this is my money” because it is simply not your money alone. It is the money you managed to obtain in the context of our highly interactive society and some of that is owed back to society.

P.S. to Apos: I agree with hawthorne that the standard convention is to define progressivity or regressivity relative to a flat tax defined as a fixed percentage of income. Your attempt to define it as a fixed monetary amount is highly non-standard. (Of course, this is all just a matter of convention and definition, but when the convention is well-established I see no reason to mess with it.)

IzzyR: what I’m saying is that sometimes two rounds of taxation may be required for efficiency, sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it’s bad for efficiency. Taxes on taxes under a sales tax (for example) are always distorting. The pollution/ congestion example is one where the double tax is a good idea. As for the double taxation of dividends, it’s a controversial area. I set out the theoretical arguments inthis recent post.

jshore, I think december’s Boston example relates to a point I made in this thread: