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I'm not sure how you read my comment as not wanting fair compensation. But there is a difference between fair compensation and everyone paid the same. Equal access to opportunities doesn't mean everyone makes 400k, it would mean everyone starts with the same opportunities to get there, and their choices determine where they go. That said, we're not an egalitarian society. We may aspire to it, we may be closer to it than we were 200 years ago, but we're not there yet.

In anycase, perfect egalitarianism is probably not possible. But for an excellent work on the subject, see John Rawls' work Justice as Fairness. As political philosophical texts go, it's fairly accessible to outsiders to the field, and it is comprehensive on the topic.

> I'm curious as to what are some alternate theories of how to do the most good besides a summing-like equation across individuals?

See, as one of many alternatives, Rawls works (perhaps most particularly Justice as Fairness, but also the earlier A Theory of Justice) which present an approach which considers the position of different individuals and groups, but does not optimize a summing-like equation (unless you take "summing-like" very loosely.)

But, ultimately, what constitutes what is desirable -- "the most good" -- is a subjective decision. Any philosophical/moral discussion of the most good is either about which axioms are most subjectively desirable to choose or which particular things fit a given set of axioms.

There's a great book on pretty much this topic in political philosophy, called Justice as Fairness by John Rawls. [0]

In the vein of this conversation, he does not argue against inequality, and breaks out of the capitalism/communist spectrum. Instead he proposed the strictures under which inequality should be allowed to persist in what he calls the Difference Principle:

Social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness:_A_Restate...

Majority of the comments seem to be discussing the merits / morality of taxation, rather than Buffet's central points.

Entertaining the discussion on the merits of taxation, I've found John Rawls' Justice as Fairness to be especially enlightening. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness) Essentially, a just society is one in which decisions are made to benefit the worst-off in society. Given a majority of the factors that contribute to individual success are outside our control (what family you were born into, what neighborhood you lived in, what school you went to, etc), a just society would in turn be one which compensates for such naturally-occurring inequalities. He provides a well-thought out argument for how progressive taxation is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) lever to do so.

Now in practice, it is true that our government has been terribly inefficient in managing tax revenue and creating public goods. But that shouldn't discount the role government can play. Realizing the potential reach and role of government, the goal shouldn't be to neuter it, but to make it more efficient.

On Buffet's central points, I find them hard to argue with. 1) Lower taxes on the rich in the last 10 years have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic growth or job creation, especially in light of the 20 years before that. 2) The front-end drivers for entrepreneurs, VCs, and angels have more to do with product creation, addressing a market need, and simply playing the game. Money is of course a big part in too, but tax cuts only play a back-end behavioral incentive- they affect the NPV of behavior that was already in play.
3) Just because the actual tax revenue on the rich may not put a huge dent on the deficit (as some comments seem to imply), the point is that the billions in tax revenue it would raise could still stave of cuts to programs that the poor and middle class depend on.

(And larger food for thought on the role of tax cuts, and how they've contributed to the deficit http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/the-char...)

There's a certain irony in the coincidence of the defendant's name being "Rawls", who was a political philosopher [0] that sought to define what "justice" should be within political society...

his work "Justice as Fairness" "describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system."

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/