I don’t know anyone who claims taxes should be only proportional to wealth or income. There are those who say it should be super-linear with income or wealth (tax the rich even more than their proportion of income), and those who say not to tax based on wealth or income, but on consumption (my preference) or the hyper-pragmatic “tax everyone, we need the money”. And of course many more nuanced variations.
I am confused why you are bringing this up. I see how the fact that there are multiple kinds of taxes and they are sometimes marginally increasing changes my points about taxes or power.
I don’t find either of your main examples (taxes or blame apportionment) particularly compelling, and gave some reasons for that. And this makes me less likely to accept your thesis that power allows an incorrect perception of moral distance, or that it (necessarily) obscures information flow.
There probably is a relationship in there—power as a measure of potential impact on almost any topic means that power can do these things. It’s not clear that it automatically or always does, nor that power is the problem as opposed to bad intentions of the powerful.
I am confused why you are bringing this up. I see how the fact that there are multiple kinds of taxes and they are sometimes marginally increasing changes my points about taxes or power.
I don’t find either of your main examples (taxes or blame apportionment) particularly compelling, and gave some reasons for that. And this makes me less likely to accept your thesis that power allows an incorrect perception of moral distance, or that it (necessarily) obscures information flow.
There probably is a relationship in there—power as a measure of potential impact on almost any topic means that power can do these things. It’s not clear that it automatically or always does, nor that power is the problem as opposed to bad intentions of the powerful.