Our book for today is Taxes, Death, and Trouble: How Starve the Beast Tax Cuts Created the Black Lives Matter Movement, by Andre L. Smith. For example, he cites Starving the Beast: Using Tax Policy and Governmental Budgeting to Drive Social Policy, going back to Leo Strauss's version of Plato's oligarchic tyranny, and to Irving Kristol, the founder of Neoconservatism.
Starving the Beast by relentlessly cutting taxes for the benefit of the wealthy deprives government of the money it needs to fund social services like well-functioning schools and hospitals, and the financial gap is filled by levying sales and sin taxes the poor cannot avoid, as well as commercial and criminal fines and fees and forfeitures and surcharges and interest to squeeze every last drop of wealth out of poor black and brown folks. So they must accept whatever job is available regardless the wages or conditions.
Mike Browns and Joyce Curnells and countless others are being taxed to death because, perfectly contrary to Adam Smith's description of a meritocratic market, those with means refuse to pay for the government that serves them only. Better exploiting the US Tax Code is part of the solution.
And totally contrary to the Walras picture of real competition, where nobody has special privileges, and nobody can be excluded. We know what we need to do, but there is a lot of work ahead of us before we can get down to it properly—in 2025, according to the plan.