The fact that both Apple and Microsoft were founded in the mid-1970s—a period when the top tax bracket stood at 70 percent—offers pretty good evidence that entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of time worrying about top tax rates. Likewise, at the bottom, the motivation to work certainly matters, but in a country as wealthy as the United States, perhaps that incentive does not need to be so extreme as to elicit the specters of homelessness and destitution.
