Outrage has been prompted by Oxfam’s estimate that the richest 1% will soon own 51% of the world’s wealth. A predictable “steal from the rich and give to the poor” response rallies public support and thereby diverts blame from the state for its inability to deliver the services for which we pay them well. The problem is inherent waste and inefficiency, not who pays how much tax. Politicians won’t actually squeeze much out of their super-rich masters but we’ll  support taxes implemented in the name of wealth redistribution and call if fair play. Taxation is the taking of money against the threat of damage for non-compliance – always has been. It’s rather like mugging, and not a lot gets sprinkled back. Over 70% of taxation is not upon our earnings anyway, but in every pound we spend; each cup of coffee, pair of shoes, drop of petrol or alcohol, massage, rent payment and watt of electricity bears the burden of a heavy state. Wealthy consumers already pay a lot more taxes on that account. If we doubled income taxes on the super-rich the extra revenue would not even cover the interest owed to bankers by our state for creating the money that prevented other bankers from going bankrupt as a result of immoral dealings. Don’t expect it to dent the deficit, and know that many of the wealthiest 1% have fingers, hands, and heads in governments across the world and would be less assured of their wealth without that leverage and control.
Were the answer to every problem “more taxation” then we would soon have 0.0% control over how we deploy our wealth, instead of just 50%.  Only 10 of those 50% in taxes is eventually spent within the category of “redistribution of wealth,” which is neither an underlying purpose of taxation, nor a priority. Are we truly incapable of re-distributing our own wealth, voluntarily, to organizations with genuine charitable credentials and goals in tune with our own?
The combination of all levied taxes sees half or more of the total wealth created by people and companies sucked into the state to fund its spending. The state overspends and borrows the excess from banks, to be repaid by our future wealth creation (which must constantly increase for the scheme to work). It works for the central banks who create that money, literally, out of thin air. It’s smoke and mirrors.
“The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” William Paterson, founder in 1694 of the Bank of England,
The state is not a necessary evil and society will not collapse into dog-eat-dog savagery without them sucking out its lifeblood to preserve order. 98% of us are caring human beings who cherish the idea of living in peace and harmony with each other. We are good at doing that. Then some 2% of us are sociopaths who see the rest as a resource to be used and exploited, having no compassion for starving babies or tortured grandmothers of their own or any other race. Unsurprisingly, politics is a common career choice for sociopaths.
In our system sociopaths sometimes get to the very top. Historical examples abound, with our own era witnessing pre-planned wars waged on false pretenses destroying the lives of countless millions. That 98% cannot imagine a human being behaving so badly is the greatest strength of the 2%, and underpins the “Big Lie.” Adolf Hitler described this in Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Even after seeing “facts which prove” they “doubt and waver,” assuming there is “some other explanation.”
Politics is not even the main game in town, though it often appears to be the only one. Examples abound of civilization self-organizing without the need of top-down control by force. In our current system, democratic or otherwise, we too often find scum rising to the top and calling the shots. In a free system we develop means to eject the scum and let cream rise to the top. The feedback loop of customer reviews does just this at Tripadvisor, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, and other new age businesses. We can do it. We have the technology, and I’m off on a tangent here which could stretch into an entire book but will not since it is already written.
TAXATION EXPLAINED, by Jean Baptiste Colbert, 17th century finance minister to Louis XIV :
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”
Talk of social engineering, climate management, and wealth redistribution is all about reducing the hissing.