I disagree with most of your use taxation to ‘punish those evil rich folks’ nonsense,
I didn't notice that in his post. There's nothing natural or divinely-mandated about our socio-economic and legal systems; we, or more commonly our prior generations and often building from a legacy of oppression or outright tyranny, have made the decisions on how wealth should be distributed. And for some reason, a lot of people seem to perversely or just ignorantly assume that an effective
productive system, like our varieties of capitalism, must also necessarily be a good or fair
distributive system. It's like saying "military chain of command is functionally efficient, and therefore the people at the top are the most beautiful" - there's simply no connection between the two.
We know that capitalism has an inherent tendency to concentrate wealth upwards, through several mechanisms but most importantly through the passive investment income which allows one person to accumulate wealth at thousands or even millions of times the rate of someone actually earning a wage. That's simply a feature of the system, like manure in a chicken farm, but there's no obvious reason why we should feel compelled to just let it keep piling up at the top. Why not spread it around a bit, use it to make fertilizer, so to speak? Supposedly the system is
meant to generate wealth for everyone, not just a few, so let's bloody well do that!
It's got nothing to do with hating or 'punishing' the people who happen to be at the top through whose accounts the system inevitably passes so much money. Quite the opposite, suggesting that they fundamentally deserve all that money seems like a level of adulation and worship which really isn't warranted (as highlighted for example in
post #403).
I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
