If people make enough to retire every three years at a 0% tax rate, then most people will retire or switch to a less productive hobby job, because the marginal utility of more money approaches zero after three years.

Tax those same people 90%, and they’ll work for 30 years.

There is evidence of this phenomenon from the early days of the automobile: Craftsmen building cars by hand could and did retire after a few dozen cars, further inflating wages by constricting demand of labor. In contrast, Ford’s screw-turning factory workers worked for decades.

I don’t buy that lowering effective wages decreases the number of hours most people will be willing to work.