The premise was how we can ensure greater diversity in the free market and protection from big conglomerates. Taxing the rich even more doesn’t help with this in any way.

In general rich are taxed more, which is fair to a point in maintaining a functional and stable society but beyond that I think it’s immoral and theft. I also hold the opinion that rich shouldn’t have ways to circumvent the tax net. Everybody in the economy should pay their fair share.

Edit: I don’t know what’s up, this was a reply to acjohnson55

Why not?

If nothing else, it should depend on how they got it.

Because it’s only a matter of time until the taxman comes for you. Soaking the rich sounds great in theory (hey, who doesn’t want free stuff), but it’s the middle class who always foots the bill for big government spending in the end. The rich have more resources to shelter their money or just move to another country. The poor don’t have any more to give. So that leaves you and I. And frankly, I don’t trust that the politicians will spend additional tax money any more wisely than they spend the tax money we give them now. Just look at San Francisco’s $10 billion budget for how effectively we can waste tax payer money.

I'm not sure I understand the leap from "I don't like taxing people excessively because they have more" to "I don't like the middle class being taxed."

Doesn't the "because they have more" bit exclude the middle class by definition? If the taxman comes for me, then we're no longer following the initial plan.

If you're suggesting that a country will run out of wealthy people to tax... I'm not sure how that would work logistically. Is that a thing that could happen?

The reason to try and tax wealthy people more is to support additional spending on social programs. The cost of these new programs will quickly exceed any additional money we can squeeze out of the wealthy (again, the wealthy have enough resources to shelter most of their money from taxes). But at that point we’ve already promised people all of these great new social benefits and we can’t walk that back now. It’s the middle class who have enough money to go after, but not so much money that they can effectively shelter their wealth, so that’s who ends up paying in the long run.

If we get rid of mountain-sized tax breaks and stop underfunding the IRS then we're fully able to collect from the wealthy.

So sure I'll complain if they "come for me" because they decided not to tax the people they promised to tax. But the solution ain't giving up on taxes. It's enforcement.

The US has global powers of taxation, ironically brought by the GOP framework of war on terror laws. There has never been a time where the US has had more ability to tax the mega-rich.

It is still difficult to get away form Uncle Sam and will be for some time.