Yes, I understand that you support decreasing public spending, but my point is that doing that isn't so easy as saying it. I think we'd have to cut our spending more than in half to accomodate a 20% flat tax rate. Which programs will we cut? Cutting our taxes that much is the most complex and difficult part of your proposal: it isn't so simple as saying "We should cut taxes."

But again, even if we could cut taxes so much that everyone could have only a 20% tax rate, I'd still say it's a good idea for the middle class to pay maybe 15%, while the wealthy pay 25%, or something along those lines.

So which programs should we cut in order to accomodate the flat tax? Welfare? Police? Child abuse agencies? The FDA? The military?

I disagree with most of what you said here.

First, the people who have the money are almost never producers. Let me use myself as an example: I am a producer. I sit at a computer and create computer software all day. I do most of the software design. The product strategist at our company evaluates the market and figures out what sort of product would be good to create. She then relays that information to me. There is also a tester, who tests the stuff I create, and there are sales people who sell it. We are all very good at our jobs, and we all get above-average wages for our jobs in the industry. But none of us are wealthy.

The wealthy people in our company know little more about our products than the names. They don't produce things, they simply decide corporate "direction" and give the company "diversity training" and that sort of thing. They don't produce a thing. The only reason they have any claim over the money our products make is because they paid us to create that project. You see, my software development team couldn't afford to create this software ourselves and try to market it. The only way we could afford to make it is if a very wealthy person pays us to create it.

Most wealthy people produce nothing, and most wealthy people are no smarter than anyone else. Though some wealthy people may be "using what they've been given", I'd say that most people who use what they've been given end up completely poor. I've been given a strong ability to program software, but if I want to be rich, I'll need to use something else.

Most of the time, that which seperates the wealthy from the poor is that the wealthy were born wealthy. Sure, investing a lot of time and money into a business is a risk, but most of the time, they have that money to invest. And make no mistake about it, if I had that sort of money, I would attempt to start up a business as well. I don't mean that no one ever goes from middle-class to wealthy, but that is not what happened for the majority of wealthy people today.

So what is it that makes the wealthy more deserving of money? They don't generally produce a thing. They aren't generally smarter. And whether you're "using what you're given" plays little part in whether you become wealthy. But what if the wealthy were smarter, and what if they were "using what they were given"? Does that make them more deserving of wealthy than someone else who works hard? Does it make them more deserving of wealth than someone who is kind and generous? It does not.

Capitalism distributes wealth in a fashion which encourages people to produce. That is the only criteria it uses for distributing wealth. Capitalism doesn't say, "This person deserves wealth, so he gets it." It says, "Giving this person wealth encourages people to produce, so he gets it."

Let's look at my job again as an example. The software I create generates something like ten million dollars a year. The fair way of distributing the wealth this software generates might be to give everyone involved an equal share, which would give me something like a million dollars a year. A different method might be to distribute wealth based on involvement in the project, which would give me something like two million dollars a year. The most fair method might simply be to forget the concept of "property" all together and say that anyone can use the product I created, and I can use the products anyone else created, so long as they aren't already in use. But each of these methods goes against the principles of capitalism: the first violates the concept of contracts, and the second violates the concept of property. Each of these methods of distributing wealth, though fair, do not encourage production.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having money. But capitalism does not distribute money fairly. You say that "no one is entitled to a rich person's money", but I say that the rich person was not entitled to more money in the first place. You say "just because someone is poor" as though the workings of fate just happened to give the poor person less than the wealthy person.

That's not what happened: the poor person is poor because we insituted capitalism. That poor person might well be working two jobs at minimum wage and doing a darn good job of it, but even though he's likely working harder than a company CEO, he's getting practically no money for it. The poor person is poor because of capitalism, and the middle class person is middle class because of capitalism.

We, the government, instituted this economic system because we think it is the best economic system. But it is still our responsibility to recognize the downsides of this system and correct them as much as possible. One of the downsides is that a small minority of the people will control most of the wealth in the nation. It is our responsibility to correct that as much as possible.