But I think it’s legitimate to go further and ask, “Why are there people as rich as this anyway?” Why aren’t there progressive taxes on both income and capital assets, as economist Thomas Piketty suggested, such that the richest people max out at a certain nicely high number, beyond which wealth is passed through to the collective that made it? People and corporations could be taxed at the high rates we had under the Eisenhower Administration, for instance, with perhaps the additional perk that individuals could choose which government programs some portion of their taxes would go to—a kind of direct democracy support for the different functions of government. If the various agencies’ funding was partly a matter of popular “vote by taxes,” rather than entirely the result of Congress’ corrupted appropriation process, then it would be interesting to see how much money NASA ended up with, as well as the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and so on. - inthesetimes.com