That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.
Interpretation
High taxes can drive people away rather than effectively redistributing wealth.
This quote highlights a critical perspective on the impact of high taxation on society. It suggests that rather than achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth, excessive taxes can lead to individuals relocating to places with lower taxes, thereby undermining the intended goals of wealth redistribution and potentially harming local economies. The implication is that high taxes may be counterproductive, as they do not bring about the social change desired by their proponents, but rather result in a loss of human capital and economic vitality.
In practice
During a speech on fiscal policy, one might use this quote to illustrate the unintended consequences of high taxation.
Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.
When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.
No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.
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