That's why poor people pay the highest percentage of their income: they have no choice, no ways to do tax evasion.
Also you have no means to change the law. But ultra rich people can push/promote "correct" people to the government or to be elected. Like Musk did.
But I think you underestimate the possibilities. You can just design the law to make taxation a prerequisite for doing business. That's what the EU is (trying to) do, and it seems to work well.
Doing business in the EU and the US is a lot more profitable than not doing business there, even if you pay taxes. That's kind of the point.
"I hate Jeff Bezos, by I'll be damned if I have to give up same day delivery $6 Chinese mugs. The local made ones are $40!"
No, free markets work reasonably well. What doesn’t work is extremely disproportionate wealth, which is a result of neoliberal policies from the 80s. Revert those policies (i.e., actually tax the wealthy), and get back to medium healthy economy of the 60s and 70s.
The key word here is income. “Wealth” and “income” tend to be conflated by ostensibly intelligent people who should know better. If I’m granted a million dollars in stock but draw a $20K salary, I’m “wealthy” but not “paying my fair share” because I’ve hardly earned any income for the year.
But I got your point. There are ways to be wealthy, have a rich lifestyle but report no taxable income/profit.
What you actually want is to have a wealth tax like in Switzerland. 0.05-0.3% annual tax based on net assets.
If you receive a stock as compensation - it is an income. If you sell them years later with profit - it is additional extra income.
Unless you have enough stock that you can take a zero or low interest loan against that stock as collateral and kick that can down the road until you die and there's a huge threshold for estate tax, that is if you've not got it structured so that the stock is owned by a trust.
Taxes always START by targeting the wealthy but have this funny habit of applying to more and more people as time goes on. The US income tax was a whopping 1% percent until you made the equivalent of $400K. How’d that work out?
Of course there's no silver bullet and high progressive taxes for the mega-wealthy do have other negative effects. Like people being less motivated to strive. Less capital to invest and less competitive companies born.
But billionaires paying less taxes than the guy sweeping floors at the local mall is absurd. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, your taxes actually start going down.