I disagree with the conclusion that all profits are earned through a social product. This article does a decent job arguing that wealth is not solely created, and rely upon various social contracts, regulations, and laws which are funded through taxes. It makes a mistake, though, when it repeatedly views the economy as a fixed size, as a pie to be allocated. It even uses the pie analogy. This particular point falls prey to the same fixed-size fallacy. The economy is not a fixed size. It's possible for a single person working on their own to invent something and sell it, by themselves, for vast sums of money. This hypothetical single person did not exploit laborers to create that wealth. They took advantage of the social systems that were in place (and should have the portion of wealth created from those systems redistributed), but they didn't take advantage of laborers. Because the economy is not a fixed size, it follows that some portion of wealth created is due to the individual or company alone creating value that did not exist before, and that this portion of wealth rightly belongs to its creator. What portion? Well, that's a more interesting debate, and the answer is certainly a larger portion than total wealth redistribution.Second, the class inequality that results from making this social product is relational. Capitalists are able to accumulate large stores of wealth only because workers do not. All things being equal, firms can raise their profits in inverse proportion to the labor costs they bear.
Numbers, not rights. Here's the questions that should be asked, studied, and answered before any question of what taxes should look like are answered by policy. What effect does high taxes have on the economy when those taxes are placed onto the wealthy? What benefits does the money earned from high taxes bring to the economy? What harms come from taxing the poor? What benefits come from taxing the poor? Find the optimal point of tax. Heck, do that for every person in the world, and tax each person until the wealth taken from them stops causing more total economic benefit than the harm caused by taking the money from them. It's not about rights, it's not about "deserve" or "earned" or any of that other bullshit. It's about picking the best policy as a nation, which is what lawmakers should be doing, not quibbling and fighting over if we have the right to tax people or not, or if the wealth people make "comes from society or their own hand". Rights are regressive ideals that state that there is some big special trait to being human. They are only useful when you are a bunch of people aren't able to properly ask and research the question of "What action is best to take here". Rights are a shotgun-type approach to make sure most people act in a generally good way without needing to think through the process, and that system should be falling to the side when we have the information gathering and organizing power we do today. Rights are like religion, they were a useful ideology a few decades ago, and they are a relic of the past that is doing more to hold society back than it is to drive it forward. Not to say that rights are totally pointless, in times where snap judgments are needed then things like rights should come into play again, but this is not one of those cases. Secondly, often the numbers/philosophy behind the collection of those numbers are wrong, and people will tend to recognize when this is true and react against the numbers on an emotional basis of rights/morality/etc. This is also fine, and often legitimate (machine learning systems being used to justify discrimination is going to be an interesting topic on this matter). However, this isn't one of those cases either. Study, get many groups to collect numbers that should be accurate, and compare and force these groups to find collection methods that generally are unbiased and fair. Use those numbers to find an accurate graph of income-tax per city based on things like cost of life and other things. Expensive? Yes. But we are taking about a practice that the function of our entire government stems from, we can justify the cost.