Every dollar the federal government takes from your paycheck destroys capital that would have funded something you never get to see. Frederic Bastiat laid this out in 1850. The seen is the road, the school, the government contract. The unseen is the business that never launched, the employee who never got hired, the machine that never got built because the investor couldn't fund it. The IRS collected $2.2 trillion in individual income taxes in fiscal year 2025. Politicians point to what that bought. Nobody points to what it killed. When the government taxes your income at 37%, it decides, on your behalf, that its priorities outrank yours. The entrepreneur who would have borrowed your invested capital now can't, because that capital no longer exists in the private market. This is the core violence of income taxation: it doesn't just redistribute wealth; it destroys the coordination signal that tells producers where demand actually lives. Prices stop reflecting real preferences. Capital migrates toward politically favored sectors instead of productive ones. Congress votes to confiscate your earnings before you touch them, through withholding introduced in 1943, specifically designed so you never feel the full weight of what gets taken. You never hold that money. You never mourn it. That is the design. Withholding tax should not be tolerated anywhere in the world.