Progressive taxation is also a recognition that most of anybody&#x27;s income is enabled by living in a modern, safe, resourceful, co-operative and free society.  Without a modern society and without the benefit of all that have come before us, we&#x27;d all be subsistence farmers.   Bill Gates may have been the most successful subsistence farmer ever, but that wouldn&#x27;t have made him rich.<p>Taxation is not theft.   Society enabled you to earn that money.   In return, it wants a cut.<p>It&#x27;s true that most of those who receive the money taken from you in taxes will not have &#x27;earned&#x27; it either.   Most of those that built the society that you&#x27;re benefiting from are dead -- the scientists that enabled modern technology, the industrialists who built the economy, the soldiers and politicians who gave us our free society -- the most important work was done by those who came before us.<p>We are all their heirs.