If you had told Thomas Jefferson that Americans would one day be paying Federal tax rates of 40 percent, never mind the additional taxes at all levels, he would have fallen flat from shock.

A medieval serf paid about 30 percent to his lord.

The taxes on the tea at the Boston Tea Party were three pence per pound of tea.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." The part you don't hear is that he said it in 1904, when the Income Tax was still over a decade in the future. At the time he said this, with state, local, and other federal taxes, the average per capita taxation burden, adjusted up to 1998 dollars, was about $366, or about three percent of what the average Californian is paying now.

Much more here, Robert. Take a good look at Figure 2, which is in constant dollars.

Let's turn it around, Robert. What tax rates would you consider too high? What's the upper limit?

Financial power only really becomes a threat when it is allowed to utilize government power to serve its ends. Suppressing competitors by regulations or worse, getting favorable treatment not available to competitors, or other methods of using government force to gain their ends. How many monopolies in history have been the result not of competition, but government action? One big reason for the Boston Tea Party was the government granting the East India Tea Company a monopoly on sales to the colonists, flattening colonial competition.

You want to limit this kind of thing, take some economic power away from the state. Step one might be a flat tax, without "special breaks." Don't hold your breath on that one, since the tax code is a major way that legislators can dispense favors in return for donations.

As P. J. O'Rourke said, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

Most of the people I argue this point with think the government doesn't have nearly as much control over our economy and means of production as it ought to, and that taxes (on the other guy of course) aren't nearly as high as they ought to be. There seems to be no upper limit to that, either.