Originally Posted by Lune
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...you are a laborer, and capitalism is not designed to work in your favor. Like Elon Musk said when explaining his support for socialism, it's called capitalism, not laborism.
Again, if you sell your labor to survive, you are a laborer, even if you are an orthopedic surgeon or entrepreneur.
A capitalist is someone who doesn't need to do work to survive, because they simply have a lot of money, and that money makes more money for the capitalist, by itself if he wants it to.
I think what a lot of people in this country fail to understand is that the vast majority of the ultra-wealthy in this country don't actually work, that is, they don't perform any kind of labor. They simply have money, and that money pays money-managers to grow itself, through investments, rent-seeking, ownership, etc. For every Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos who still participates in the growth of his own capital, there are 10 capitalists living the only actual real type of free life that exists in the United States: economic freedom, freedom from reliance on the sale of labor to survive.
This is why taxation is so important. Wealth is conducive to more wealth, and the more wealth you have the more conducive it is. It's a fundamental law of economics. Taxation is a mechanism through which the government can counter this fundamental force of capitalism to make it so that our society doesn't spiral into aristocracy. And this mechanism has been broken since Reagan snuck his way into government and sabotaged it.
Taxation is not just useful, it's a fundamental, necessary fixture of free market and mixed market economics, of capitalism. Like the microbes that break down all of Earth's dead things and return their atoms to the rest of the world, taxation prevents capital from concentrating endlessly in the hands of capitalists, and returns it to the rest of the economy, and the government, when actually doing its job, is instrumental in this. Therefore, I would argue, the government's single overarching prerogative, its first and most essential duty, is to tax capitalists.
If you truly support free market economics and competitive market capitalism, you must also support the progressive taxation of capitalists.
Anyone telling you taxation is theft, is unfair, stifles competition, or whatever else, is a bad faith actor serving only the interests of capitalists at the expense of the rest of society, and should not be listened to.
I'm writing this for educational purposes because it increasingly seems that Americans who claim to support free market economics don't actually know what that means, because in a free market you're actually not supposed to have monopolies, and you're not supposed to selectively subsidize business models that rely on ultra low-wage labor that compete with similar businesses that use a higher wage model (Chick fil-A vs Burger King, Costco vs Walmart) by coercing laborers into accepting ultra low wage work out of desperation.
But most of all, in a healthy free market, you are supposed to have progressive taxation.
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