Proudhon famously said “Property is theft.” (Well, he said it in French.) He had something of a case for this statement in 1840, because the predominant form of wealth was land, and the rich couldn’t very well claim to have created it; if you were a land baron, chances are that some family member in the distant past used force or guile to steal it from its previous owner. Today, of course, land is not the primary kind of wealth, and we recognize that ideas, management expertise, and capital help to create value, as well. In today’s world, therefore, Proudhon is clearly wrong.
The GOP turns Proudhon on his head; it believes taxes are theft. To the average Republican, capitalists are job-creating superyachts, and the rest of us are just dinghies drafting in their wake. Every investor is Henry Ford or Steve Jobs; he should be celebrated and taxed as lightly as possible. That, of course, ignores the fact that a large percentage of capital is inherited, and the rest of it would be useless without courts, infrastructure, law enforcement, and an educated labor force, none of which was created by the self-proclaimed “makers”. Someone has to pay to build, operate, and maintain all this stuff. It might as well be the rich, who benefit disproportionately from it; after all, they have more to lose from feeble government than you and I do.
The bottom line is that the labor theory of value is incomplete, but so is the idea that capital is solely responsible for economic growth. Both have legitimate claims; neither has a monopoly on justice. The task of government is to strike a balance that provides adequate incentives for entrepreneurs and a reasonable degree of protection for everyone else.