"I think it is also worth noting that unlike some ancient communities, the Epicureans did not live in a commune or expect rich members to hand over all their possessions to the collective. Epicurus told the rich to be generous; Jesus told the rich to become poor."
Comment by Matt Cherry on the Yahoo site
And from Victor Kioulapiades:
Abraham Lincoln said that "you can’t enrich the poor by impoverishing the rich". With that simple principle, I believe, Lincoln mitigated the Christian mandate –more rhetorical than literal, I suspect– with a more practicable economic sensibility. Obviously, our great philanthropists have followed the "Epicurus model" of generosity, not the Christian one. That is not to say that either they or Christian dogma is "bad", but simply that they are/were real unrealistic.
I am not sure which Christian sect in modern times has recommended that the rich should become poor or be made poor! Certainly not the “christian” fundamentalists who have been elbowing their disagreeable way into the political life of the United States.
What I believe is that everyone should pay a fair proportion of their income to sustain all the things that constitute a modern, civilized nation: not just the armed forces and the diplomats, but the whole apparatus of the policing and the law, the educational system, the roads and infrastructure, the central bank and a host of other institutions that separate the developed West from the chaos of developing countries in the throes of civil war.
The idea that the rich can and should escape tax is perverse. Look at the end of the Roman Empire and you see that the rich paid no tax at all. Every new Emperor forgave them their back taxes. Result? No stable government that wuld allow talented people to make money in the first place. This isn’t to do with politics, it is common sense. So why do so few people have any?