Punishing success

About

The phrase "punishing success" typically refers to any sort of progressive taxation, i.e. taxes applied more heavily to those with more money to spare. It implies an argument that progressive taxation is a bad idea because it disproportionally "punishes" those who are being "successful", which further implies that they must be providing something we would want to encourage, i.e. value to society (otherwise why would we care about nurturing their "success"?).

Flaws

The problem with this implicit argument is twofold:

• It equates wealth and worth in that it assumes that those who are making the most money must therefore be providing the most value to society.
• It equates taxation with punishment, ignoring the fact that taxation is primarily a means of accomplishing positive goals by collecting surplus income from those who can spare it, while progressive taxation further asks those who can spare more to contribute more.
  • Specific tax incentives are often used as a way of encouraging certain behaviors and discouraging others, which arguably might be called "reward" and "punishment" respectively, but this is certainly not the purpose of progressive taxation in general.

Conclusions

Progressive taxation isn't "punishing success", it's punishing selfishness and encouraging upward mobility at the bottom while discouraging it at the top -- not to mention maintaining a free society.

If you don't make taxation mandatory in some way, then only people who are naturally altruistic -- interested in serving the common good -- will pay them. We'd be punishing altruism (by letting altruists shoulder the entire financial burden of funding society) and rewarding the selfish by allowing them to keep excess profits they simply don't need.

If you don't make taxation progressive in some way, then you're letting those with more surplus pay proportionally less of their disposable income.

If you have a marginal tax on income over basic living expenses, then this is at least somewhat progressive -- but you're still unnecessarily hindering the upward mobility of those at the bottom end of the scale (while getting very little actual revenue from them) exactly as much as you're hindering the upward mobility of those at the upper end, where upward mobility is neither needed by the individual nor wanted by society.

We want upward mobility encouraged at the bottom, and discouraged at the top, otherwise we get an increasingly unequal society.

A free society cannot function with too much economic disparity, much less disparity that spirals ever upwards.

Notes

Some of these ideas were discussed here.