Originally Posted by loquitur

Sure, that's true, but it always comes back to what sorts of activities one wants to tax and at what levels. And then you have to have a theory about why capital gains should be treated the same as income, and you'd need to account for the fact that changing the capital gains rules affects how much tax gets paid because the asset owners have ways to avoid recognizing the gains, most easily by refusing to sell.

I suppose we could just mindlessly cap everyone's income from any source, and tax away everything above a certain level. That might satisfy some urge of yours that you choose (erroneously) to call "fairness," but it also would be highly destructive and economically insane.