Not all taxes are arbitrary. You can't argue that taxes on natural resources are arbitrary. Take mineral resources as an example. I think it's very difficult to find the idea of taxing the use of these resources as absurd in a similar fashion to those presented by this article. Same can be said about radio spectrum.
If we applied the same philosophy to land, we'd need much fewer "arbitrary" tax types and percentages.
Our tax systems are indeed deeply flawed and arguing that any system is arbitrary and equally absurd/paradoxical/inefficient is incorrect since there are examples of ethical (and I would argue necessary) taxes.
> You can't argue that taxes on natural resources are arbitrary.
We can swap the Income Tax for an Air Tax if that helps, air is a resource. Charge by lung capacity. Big fellas do tend to make more money so it'd probably be a rough proxy for wealth and class I expect.
Resource taxes:
* Disincentive producing resources.
* Are still arbitrary.
Fundamentally what a tax is recognising is that Entity A did the work, but Entity B should decide who gets the fruit of that work. There is no acknowledgement that Entity A might be better than B at deciding what to do, or mechanism to test it, or even really a jury to decide it in practice (in theory the legislators could, but frankly I don't think any of the legislative bodies I'm aware of could tackle that sort of micromanagement). We don't even have consensus on what value system we should use to decide which entity was going to make a better decision even if we have perfect information about both hypothetical resource allocations. It is all ultimately arbitrary.
Even the no-tax pure free market solution is arbitrary, the argument in favour of it is it has the incentive structure that results in the most production, and big picture history suggests that maximising production will get best overall living standards. But it is clearly arbitrary, people love to point out the wild wealth differences between people who seem pretty similar except for minor differences.
These are not academic or theoretical concerns, this stuff is the meat of most of the big political debates that rage on.
Calling some of those taxes does distort the reality a little - a natural resources tax for example is really the state selling the resource owned by the state to a third party (which makes not "taxing" it even more offensive to effectively corrupt).
If we applied the same philosophy to land, we'd need much fewer "arbitrary" tax types and percentages.
Our tax systems are indeed deeply flawed and arguing that any system is arbitrary and equally absurd/paradoxical/inefficient is incorrect since there are examples of ethical (and I would argue necessary) taxes.