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>The first point to note is that the 90% rate kicked in at an earning rate of several million in today's money I did note that by saying "granted it may be his

• AlisdairO 18y ago
  Hm. You're right, I didn't adequately address your post. My apologies. When it's over that many millions, then yes, I think it's reasonable. It's highly questionable whether any individual is actually worth, say, 100 million a year. There's virtually always someone who could take their place - if Bill Gates hadn't made his fortune on MS, a different, perfectly adequate OS vendor would have succeeded, and the PC landscape probably wouldn't be so vastly different from what it is today. Ditto Ellison, etc. If the individual isn't totally irreplaceable, it's a bit hard to justify their having the income of 2000 average households - so it's fair to tax that income as a correction of the unfair inequalities that a capitalist system naturally leads to. The truly irreplaceable people - the once in a generation brilliant minds - tend not to be vastly wealthy anyway. A further point is that few people become entrepreneurs in order to become stellar-level rich. Sure, they want to be wealthy, and I think we all know that a tax system that discourages people from wanting to become millionaires is a mistake, but it's unlikely that massive taxes on people earning more than 50 million a year is going to discourage entrepreneurship. I'm not, however, arguing that a 90% tax rate is necessarily sensible. In the modern world, people will likely just move out of the country to avoid the taxation.