Income Tax, 5
As a reversal of the ethics of survival, taxes expropriate, extort the fruit of the work from its producer to bestow it to the discretion of those who did not produce it, which in turn will use it to fuel their own arbitrary power and questionable agendas, not to mention bluntly lining their pockets.
The first form of penalising merit is dispossessing it of its rightful results, and the first form of rewarding demerit is gifting it with what the merit did produce.
This is unfair. And as human beings resent injustice it tends to have consequences on the levels of production and social cohesion.
But another form of penalising merit is exploiting parasitically its very will to help and make things go right: as what one penalises one does not get, penalising merit by dispossession and injustice ought to discourage it and thus curtail production; but it so happens that merit is much willing to help and contribute, hence as a result it will continue to produce above the level the penalisation would reduce it to, despite the parasitic pressure.
This further increases the penalisation of merit and the rewarding of demerit, particularly by subjecting it to the blackmail that the wellbeing of all depends on its willingness to bend to the blackmail itself.
Indeed we may keep on investigating many such facets, but let’s now move instead to another basic implementation where the Trojan horse and the systematic reversal merge beautifully.
Politicians and their puppeteers favour progressive income taxes so much that they not only take taxes for granted, but they also and above all take progressive taxes for granted.
Just to make it clear, indeed progressive taxation means that the more you earn, the more taxes you pay, but not simply because bigger earnings subject to the same rate result in higher taxes, but always in proportion. Oh no; it’s much more than that, because the more you earn, the higher the rate, so on a hypotetical graph the curve of taxes paid rises much more, much faster than the curve of the taxed earnings.
