>>>OTOH, I have to agree with Marcia in one point - any system that's supposed to catch the thieves and give the loot back to the people usually ends up rewarding the thieves and punishing those who live well because they work a lot (soft or hard, can't say, being biased towards software) and have results that satisfy a need, which brings money. This has happened on both three sides of the rusty curtain, and just shows that no system is immune to corruption. Which does not mean we shouldn't try to do it right - take back from the thieves, and reward the diligent.
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>>The only thing I am confused about is how it came to be assumed that everyone who is successful is a thief?
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>Now I see how I butchered my sentence. Forget that.
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>Redo:
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>Any system that's supposed to catch the thieves and give the loot back to the people usually ends up rewarding the thieves and punishing those who live well because they work a lot (soft or hard, can't say, being biased towards software) and have results that satisfy a need, which brings money for day to day survival, and doesn't leave much time to take care of getting everything up to snuff regarding the laws. These people get hit by fiscal constraints which were designed to catch other fish, simply because they don't expect that they should worry about that. I've seen my small entrepreneur customers back home be hit by such things - with the financial police camping in their offices for days, while the bigger fish, about whom everyone knew how dirty they were, either got a pat on the shoulder or weren't visited at all.
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>The thieves give a bad name to the rich. But they get away with it - knowing what they are, they take measures and play the system. The system changes, but they just adjust, that's their way. OTOH, honest working people get caught when system changes in order to repair the damage done by these guys, because they didn't even know they should take measures, and even when they suspect they may get hurt, they usually don't have the expertise. So if a fiscal system is redesigned to rectify injustice of a previous system, which may have let many get rich by fraud, theft or art (the one art in which they have confidence), it may do some good on the average, but in that average you can find a lot of those who were hit but shouldn't have been, and vice versa. Which is just more injustice.
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>And that's the thinking into which I got started off by Marcia's "And like a lot of liberals, you want to punish success. I believe that people have a right to enjoy what they have worked so hard to achieve." - because those unjustly hurt by a measure intended to hit others will rightfully perceive that measure as punishment for success.
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>There was a joke once, back then and back home, about a new tax on doctors, in a fixed annual amount.
>- but why should we pay that?
>- it's a known fact that all doctors take bribes, and it's only fair to share that with others, so this is a way to do it without extra accounting.
>- but I have never taken a bribe!
>- well, why didn't you?
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>I may be completely off the mark here, though. I don't even know what are the proposed changes and how would they apply - so whether this has any bearing to what I know from elsewhere or is it simply a completely different matter, is to be seen. But the "punishing success" has hit a nerve on both sides of me. I've seen the damage it can do (even if when it wasn't by means of taxes - the disincentive cuts deep), and OTOH I've also heard some undeserving folks claim that they were victims of it when they were successful by any means except honest work.

I'm afraid that you are all too accurate...