The narrative that capital and government are natural enemies is deeply flawed. It didn&#x27;t actually exist in quantity until the Hearst newspapers set it alight. Sure, you had the Wobblies and all, but they were considered lunatic fringe.<p>Taxation is (ab)used, IMO, to promote normative ideas far too much. It should simply be a way to pay for government, nothing more, nothing less.<p>If it could be deployed to promote normative ideas cheaply, and there was general consensus about what norms to promote it&#x27;d be different. But there&#x27;s too much ardent BS from both sides to trust this mechanism - it would be much more honest to withdraw from it.<p>This is doable, with tools from economics but using norms to derive other norms is a good way to end up with entangled and bizarro systems. Just getting people to agree on Coase&#x27;s interpretation of externalities seems nearly impossible. We have <i>partial</i> technocracy, with ideological shims rather than stern empirical underpinnings.