Compound Empowerment and Fair Taxation
Compound empowerment has been evoked to justify progressive taxation and other policies which stress the fundamental fairness of taxing wealthy individuals and corporations in a manner commensurate with their earnings. Because private capital is compounded by infrastructural resources held in common, supporters of progressive taxation argue that rich individuals and businesses should be called upon to support the infrastructures that enable the acquisition and maintenance of their wealth. Since a poor individual uses compound empowerment to a far lesser degree than wealthy individuals, it follows that the former would pay a smaller portion of taxes than the latter. Advocates of tax cuts or other policies that mitigate the taxation of the wealthy tend to argue that progressive taxation "punishes" the rich for their superior performance in the market. The concept of compound empowerment, on the other hand, argues that, having generated their wealth in part through public structures, fairness demands an equitable return to those structures through graduated taxation.
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