Economists often like to express taxation and economic activity in terms of pies: when taxes are low, they say, the people work hard to enlarge the pie, but the government only gets a thin slice of the pie. As the government increases taxes, its share of the pie increases but people begin to do less work, so the overall size of the pie shrinks. If the government sets tax rates extremely low or extremely high, its take will approach zero. In the first case it gets very little of a large pie; in the latter case there is hardly any pie because hardly anyone works.
