Or to borrow a line Snopes says Willie Sutton never uttered, soaking the rich is less about spite or punitive measures and more the fact "that's where the money is." One of your neighbors (et al.) once observed that Robin Hood didn't stole from the rich because stealing from the poor is pointless, not out of principle.

All of which is to say, everything costs money, whether in government or the private sector. Provided we carefully watch the people we elect to count our beans, a lot of things cost LESS if paid for with taxes instead of directly out of our individual pockets, but still aren't free. Lockheed manufactures stealth fighters for profit, not patriotism, and if we want to keep deploying them we'll spend tax money for the privilege.

Whether or not it's fair to expect people who flip burgers to devote as large a percentage of their income to that as do the people paying them, it's not realistic because you can't get blood from a stone. Adopting the flat 15% income tax Senator Lamar Alexander famously suggested would devastate our national defence as well as result in millions of elderly and/or poor people starving to death in the streets; even he implicitly recognized this when he revived his proposal three years ago as a 17% flat tax. Endorsing a flat tax is endorsing either that or a big increase in your own taxes, so if you want neither of those things I strongly suggest reconsidering your endorsement of a flat tax that would--MUST--inevitably cause (at least) one of them.

Personally, I understand (sort of) the Libertarian view that all forms of government are a pernicious evil best eliminated, that taxes are thus an inseparable and particularly undesirable form of that evil. What flabbergasts me is that many Republicans embrace the "my country, right or wrong!" philosophy, then turn right around and finanically hamstring the object of their fanatical devotion. No organization can be run on a shoe string budget, and that definitely includes the government of the most powerful nation in history. We tax the rich more, as every advanced nation does, because we need the money and they're the ones who have it, not out of malice. Whether or not it's fair, that's the cold hard reality; while changing reality is, to an extent, a viable option, until we change that one a flat tax is NOT viable.