Debt to society and "you didn't build that"
Kyle Baxter with a great piece on the wealthy’s debt to society:
If we grant this argument—that we pay taxes because our success means we have a moral duty to pay taxes, whatever the rate may be—we are all dependent on the government’s services, and thus all our income is rightly the government’s. It is only through the government’s benevolent, altruistic nature we are allowed to keep what portion we do, so be happy with it—because you only earned some unnamed portion of it anyway. We—and by we, I mean we—object to that because intuitively we know that isn’t the case. Whether someone’s success is built on other people’s work or not, they deserve their success. No one else can arbitrarily claim moral right to it.
