That particular quoted line reminds me of a friend, who when she got a $10k raise, could do nothing but bitch about how 'half of it was going straight to the government' (despite it actually being only about 30%). If you define how wealthy you are by how much is taken from you, you should probably re-examine your priorities.

You can let people become wealthy, and therefore give people incentive to invest and create, without creating the kind of insane inequality we currently have in the US.

His rant gets ridiculous, though, when he starts talking about doing away with the link between money and power... "We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." That might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen a smart person say. Money is power. pg probably has someone mow his lawn. I can't do that. Why? Because pg is rich and can pay someone to do it, I am not, therefore I can't.

But that's not Power with a capital "P", you say. But it is. That's what power is, the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. If you have money, in a capitalist society, you have power, by definition. Whether you abuse that power, or use it for things that people consider to be bad (like buying off members of Congress) is a totally different story.

What implications does this have? Well, one of them is that money is, to many, a worthless thing to have if you strip away the power that comes along with it. Severing the connection between money and power would demotivate people the same way taxes do because, ultimately, they are the same thing: you used to have X, now you have X-Z.