Oddbean

Hear me out... - You live in a society with 10'000.000 of working people in the country. - Your work life would be exactly let's say 1'000.000 units of time. - You work 10 units of time per day and each unit is worth $1 - You have to pay taxes for X reason from those work hours a 10% to be generous (no other taxes) - This means that for 30 month days, you have to give away $30 leaving you with $270 to live with. - Which in value this tax is equivalent to the 10% of your life. - You are okay with it bc the idea of paying this tax in an ideal scenario is to reinvest it back to society in order to make life better for everyone. But then the case is revealed, it seems like a group of politicians has been taking a cut of those taxes via corruption equivalent to a 10% of the taxes of everyone has given away and sacrificed with the hope of getting a better society for them and their sons and daughters. So the above would mean that in terms of value and time, the politician stole about 0.1% of the value you produced, which means that if this continued he would have stolen the value of about 1k units of time over your whole life, how much you could have done with those hours? How much progress this value you produced could have brought to you and your children? Not only that, but what about all the other people in society? If they all got the same value per hour in average as you ($1), this would mean that those politicians would have stolen about 1k per person * 10M people? that's about: 10'000.000.000 Which is the equivalent of the whole working life's of 10.000 people... Maybe that 0.1% in percentage seems negligible, but in the end the impact is huge, so how they should pay? - Jail paid for with you taxes? - Forced labor their whole lifes? - Death penalty? - Or maybe the price of dragging down society and slowing its progress is not that important? What do you think?