This assumes that we want the govt to get the most money it can. Only a population of willing slaves thinks that increasing govt revenue is a good thing.
Rose Friedman said of the Laffer Curve, approximately,
“Who said we want revenue to the Treasury to be maximized? We should want taxes much lower than that!”
“This assumes that we want the govt to get the most money it can. Only a population of willing slaves thinks that increasing govt revenue is a good thing.”
Exactly correct.
The further problem with this analysis is that it’s one-dimensional.
From a purely economic standpoint, government might be able to extract more money from us without discouraging productivity.
But a second dimesion is freedom. If we give zero dollars to the state, we have maximum freedom, at least in an economic sense. If we give all of our income to the state, we’re slaves. The curve relating those extremes does not rise, then fall like the Laffer curve, it moves only in one direction: greater tax rate, less freedom.
The government’s job should not be to maximize tax revenues, but to find the a balance which provides adequate funding while maximizing the personal economic freedom of the taxpayers.
But when you have a political party, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a compliant media which operates on the principal that everything belongs to government, and government needs to find the minimum it can let us keep, then personal economic freedom falls to the wayside.