From The Quotable Mises — surrounding passage

333 If the present tax rates had been in effect from the beginning of our century, many who are millionaires today would live under more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man. Planning for Freedom , p. 16 Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success. Planning for Freedom , p. 121

“Estate taxes of the height they have already attained for the upper brackets are no longer to be qualified as taxes. They are measures of expropriation.”

Planning for Freedom , p. 32 Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away. Economic Policy , p. 84 The metamorphosis of taxes into weapons of destruction is the mark of present-day public finance. Human Action , p. 734; p. 741 Taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless.