Quote from Humpy:
Those that will object are:-
4. Those wanting others to shoulder their tax obligations
These days it seems the "tax obligation" is largely decided by people that only benefit from other peoples' taxes paid.
That's one of the fundamental problems with democracy I think. The 90% that are chronic underachievers get to decide how to extort the remaining 10%, and allocate the extortion proceeds as they see fit.
I'm sort of happy that some productive elements have said "enough is enough," and moved some of their wealth out of reach of all these entitlement fuckheads who deserve all kinds of free benefits simply for existing, or want to flush money down the toilet in Iraq, or give hundreds of billions of dollars to SocGen and Deutsche, or make my healthcare suck, etc etc. (please note that I'll likely change my position racidally should I become needy, a bank employee, or lose and be unable to replace my healthcare coveage

)
In principle I actually think it's healthy, to some extent: if the regime becomes too oppressive to those who achieve, the achievers just pack their stuff and go somewhere less oppressive. Knowing this, the regime should aim to retain its productive elements, not drive them away by penalizing success...
No need to type up all the competing theories. I've heard most of them, and agree that many do have some merit (just not enough to totally overcome my own opinion).