Comment by avmich
21 days ago
> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.
I think this implies that we all should aim to have for everybody those abilities. That is, if somebody is unable, in this sense, to be ethical because he's just trying to get by, it's actually our problem - e.g. he sells cigarettes and that harms us. So we need to some extent work on the goal of everybody having abilities to live ethically.
Yes, we could tax higher incomes until we've reached that goal.
Tangentially, the solution would not be higher 'income tax', but higher capital gains tax.
The confusion largely is that 'income tax' is really 'wage tax'. Income common wealthy people with lots of capital is return on their capital investment, which is exluded from that tax.
I can fill in the blanks in my head, but I doubt they are what you're thinking. Would you mind elaborating on the cause/effect you have in mind? It is difficult for me to imagine this in and of itself being successful. We would also need to solve the allocation of those collected funds, as in many countries it would likely go to welfare, defense, corruption, etc.
Income tax is class warfare. No thank you
There's a lot of beneficial things that might happen if we, as a society, worked at helping the Invisible Hand manifest. Especially if we also ceased putting so much effort into fighting it.
One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that the exchanges are all voluntary. In practice they are quite clearly not.
That's a basic tenet of the free market, not of capitalism. The two are not the same.