Rising tides and boats comes to mind.
I do not plain on retiring, and if I did I do not expect government social security (I am in the US) will be there to fund it so I do have a private retirement account that currently the US Monetary policy and government regulations/spending is doing its level best to destroy
How could income based taxation be theft unless we're considering all profit theft? Either it's immoral for someone with power over you to demand part of the value you produce or it isn't.
These are choices I make in a free(ish) market. Companies offer their goods, I choose to buy or not
Similar with labor, I go to the market offer my knowledge and labor for a Wage, if I set my price to high companies will refuse to hire me, if I set my price to low I am missing out on profit.
Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that, the government with the full authority to initiate violence injects itself with a demand that for every hour of labor I sell I must provide the government with a 10-40% cut of not only my profit from the sell but the gross transaction price. They do so under the threat of violence (aka imprisonment) if I refuse their order.
The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
Take a weekend off and calculate how much 'fees' you would have to pay for 'private defense services', infrastructure, judiciary, police and all the other things if they were made private.
> The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life
What religious delirium.
> But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The dastarty act of providing military, police, firefighting, law, justice, social services - all the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society where you wouldn't even have the social rank in order to be able to talk against your feudal lord in public like this.
There is no magical, divine, extraterrestrial or supernatural force that provides this modern society that you live in, and all the rights and freedoms that you have in that society. We, the people, have managed to make that happen through the mechanisms we invented. And one of those mechanisms is the state that is owned by its people.
Only in the ultra far right US. Where everything works so perfectly because of that belief.
https://www.businessinsider.com/asce-gives-us-infrastructure...
Personal I am supporter of the Henry George Single Tax model to fund society instead of income based taxation
Don't invent stuff to make an argument. Wage slavery is what happens in the 'free market'. The very invention of wage slavery was to make conditions of slavery happen after slavery was abolished so that former slaveowners wouldnt go bankrupt. It was implemented in post civil war US, then it was copied by Brazilian slaveowners when slavery was abolished in Brazil.
Progressive taxation is our most effective tool for ensuring that a few people don't end up owning everything. For those of us who end up wealthier than the rest it's the price you pay for society providing you with a healthy, educated workforce, currency, roads etc.
Most of the other replies to this point are not really that helpful. The actual economic point is that since income taxes apply to /everyone/, they do not make you in particular less rich, because your relative amount of money is maintained. In fact, they're one of the main things making the currency valuable by providing demand for it, so you could say they're what make you rich.
VATs are more effective taxes at collecting revenue though, which is why most European countries use them, but only land value taxes avoid deadweight loss. Thanks Henry George.
