But it's the richer people who provide employment. Tax them at the same rate as anyone else, that way they will pay much higher taxes because their income is much higher than say, a factory worker. Plus all the people the rich employ pay taxes instead of receiving government hand-outs if they were unemployed.
It's wealth and growth that create a healthy economy. Stagnation, or lack of growth causes unemployment. That's what you would have if the rich are taxed out of existence.
Venezuela is first and foremost an example of the problems resulting from employing an extremist form of an economic system. Currently it is socialism, attempting to control all aspects of an economy with government fiat, and the inevitable corruption that comes with it, as the economy attempts to resist such control.
Venezuela got to this point because of a reaction to the previous economic system which was just as extreme and just as destined to failure, an oligarchy where corruption of the democratic system was being used to make a few families obscenely rich, leaving the majority of the rest in poverty.
Both socialism and oligarchy in the worse cases de-evolve into authoritarian rule. Oligarchy into fascism and socialism into centralized communism.
Venezuela is an example of the need for moderation. The most successful economies in the world strike a balance between the two extremes of socialism and oligarchy. They are what is called a mixed mode capitalistic economy with some aspects left to the market and some to the government.
Unbridled capitalism, the free market, is as flawed as socialism is, just in different ways. With apologies to Winston Churchill, capitalism is a terrible economic system, but it is the best system yet devised.
The fatal flaw of capitalism is that it tends over time to concentrate income and wealth into progressively fewer and fewer hands producing an oligarchy. The saving grace of this flaw is the mixed economy, where the government minimizes this flaw by constantly redistributing income and wealth from the rich to the poor.
Therefore progressive taxation is an important part of operating a stabile capitalistic system. It isn't stealing from the rich what they have naturally earned, it is required to preserve the economic system. It isn't socialism, it is a vital part of capitalism.
And no, it isn't "the rich who provide employment." It is the corporations and the individuals who hire to fill the existing demand for products and services, who improve productivity and who create new demand by creating new products. A large number of the wealthy are passive investors in instruments that don't produce anything of value to the economy, the stock market and Treasury bills for example. They aren't important to the economy except to the degree to which they hurt it by reducing demand for products for consumption.
