That's irrelevant. If the LAW is unethical, then violating it is not. "Legal" is only relevant to the extent that it can be enforced, and those laws may become unenforceable if enough of the enforcers decide the law ought not be implemented.
But Bill Gates has already been taxed on the income that his $80 billion is left over from. He, along with the others above the percentile who collectively own 50% of the wealth (actually about 2%, not 0.1%), already paid for the government that makes that kind of wealth accumulation possible. They paid at rates that already discriminate against them, because they're a minority and the majority collectively have the political power to vote themselves services and vote others the bill. So what more is left to pay for, to be laid at the door of the wealth difference? You and JH appear to be arguing that the circumstance that Bill Gates et al. didn't consume enough to use up all their after-tax income is grounds for the government to discriminate against them. I don't see why. Consuming less doesn't harm the community; quite the reverse. Are you suggesting that, unlike protecting accumulations of property, protecting the property rights of people who consume their income isn't a burden on the government, because they don't have much stuff to be protected? That's not how it works. Without government protection of their property, people who don't save wouldn't be consuming their income. Their income would be consumed by robbers, the same as Bill Gates' billions would be.
Does that cut both ways? Would you also say that if there's nothing wrong with the poor acting unethically in their own interests, then there's nothing wrong with the rich doing the same?
Each person's act of consuming less might potentially harm himself, but that doesn't mean anyone's act of consuming less harmed other people in general. And the community would probably actually be better off if everyone decided to consume less, since people would simply be deferring consumption to a time in the future when they'd find consumption more useful.
You're assuming that paper financial instruments that don't produce anything you can see other than interest or dividends aren't producing anything you can't see. But never mind that -- it's inessential to the issue at hand.
Failing to drink your own blood has no power to stop blood from circulating through other people's bodies. The total blood supply is not a fixed quantity. Money is a debt instrument -- money is the memory of favors done and not yet returned. If too many people owe too many favors to a few people who are not calling in their favors, and the resulting shortage of IOUs is causing economic activity in general to decline, it's not the nonconsumption that's the problem. Nonconsumption has no magical power to stop people from scrawling up new IOUs and continuing to do favors for one another. The problem is not enough IOUs. You don't need rich people to call in their favors to fix that; you need a printing press. The cure for a recession caused by low demand isn't Bill Gates buying stuff he doesn't need; it's government buying stuff people do need. Isn't that what Keynes said?
Are you of the impression that income tax is the only form of taxation?
