Tax Lawyer's Blog

I found a wonderful article on confiscatory taxation over at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute website.

Today the main instrument of confiscatory interventionism is taxation. It does not matter whether the objective of estate and income taxation is the allegedly social motive of equalizing wealth and income or whether the primary motive is that of revenue. What alone counts is the resulting effect.

The average man looks at the problems involved with unveiled envy. Why should anybody be richer than he himself is?

Here’s why:

A law that prohibits any individual from accumulating more than ten millions or from making more than one million a year restricts the activities of precisely those entrepreneurs who are most successful in filling the wants of consumers. If such a law had been enacted in the United States fifty years ago, many who are multimillionaires today would live in more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man.

Here’s the conclusion:

It is manifestly contrary to the interest of the consumers to prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities up to the limit to which the public approves of their conduct of business by buying their products.

Here again the issue is who should be supreme, the consumers or the government? In the unhampered market the behavior of consumers, their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determines each individual’s income and wealth. Should one vest in the government the power to overrule the consumers’ choices?

Brunnen gesprochen!

Related Posts:

• Obama’s Tax the Rich Plan Won’t Work, Tax Analysts Say
• Obama Tax Policy: Scaring off the Job Creators
• The Myth of the Evil Rich: I’ll Believe in Winged Steeds First!
• Who Pays Taxes: Top 1% Pay More than Bottom 95%
• Taxing the Rich Because You Can: The Beginning of Totalitarianism

Links:

• Ludwig Von Mises – Biography
• The Austrian School of Economics

Bookmark & Share: