Wrong Thinking on Taxes

David Atkins, who writes on Digby's blog (among others), links to this article in the Times on Saturday, which apparently has gone viral.  And I admit it is a good read and reflects my own perception (from years of experience) of the Wall Street mentality.

But I want to focus on David's concluding sentence, which I find troubling:

Wall Streeters often whine that people hate them without good reason. But of course that's not true. People hate them for very good reason. There are the inevitable degenerate moral cretins who watch a film like The Wolf of Wall Street (or Michael Douglas' Wall Street for that matter) and want to be that guy. But those with a moral compass read accounts like this, or ones by Michael Lewis, or films about Wall Street, and understand that while the boring business of loans, liquidity and investment has value, the destructive, wealth-addicted, deeply immoral and Objectivist culture of modern Wall Street cannot be salvaged.

It must be cleansed with the purifying fire of punitive taxation and regulation.

Can we stop talking about taxation being "punitive"?  Please?

Look, taxation fundamentally is the means by which our society, through its government, generates the resources to undertake activities that everyone benefits from.  Contrary to the views of conservatives, we don't impose taxes to punish, and we should stop characterizing taxation as a form of punishment.

Look, I agree that taxation, like other actions taken by the government, can be a means to encourage helpful actions and discourage harmful actions.  That's why we tax tobacco and alcohol products.  But this is regulation, not punishment.

Look, I think there are legitimate, regulatory reasons for imposing a marginal income tax rate of 90% on the highest incomes.  Concentration of wealth is a problem in a free market economy.  The whole concept of anti-trust laws is a recognition that concentration of wealth and economic power is anti-competitive, and anti-free market, and in the long run harmful for the economy and for society (to say nothing of the way that it distorts our democracy, and makes the government less responsive to the desires of the vast majority of our citizens).  That doesn't make a 90% tax rate "punitive."

As a liberal, I think we need to stop talking in these terms.  Labelling taxation as punitive is buying into the language of the right-wing anti-taxers.

Taxation is a way to fund the government and to regulate behavior.  It is not punishment.