Amazon founder Jeff Bezos holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He graduated summa cum laude. He was a senior vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw in 1994 when he decided to quit his position to start the online book-selling company that later became Amazon.

Bezos’s boss and colleagues at D. E. Shaw were dumbfounded when he revealed his intention to leave that lucrative position on Wall Street. They saw little viability in his plan to sell books online, and thought he was taking a huge gamble. Investors reportedly laughed at the idea. But Bezos was unmoved. He had learned earlier that year that web usage was growing at a 2,300 percent clip annually. His key insight was that commerce would eventually flourish on such a rapidly growing platform.

Bezos is said to have used a “regret minimization framework” to help him make the decision to leave the hedge fund. He mentally calculated how much he might regret not pursuing the entrepreneurial idea, and decided that he would rather try and fail than be permanently haunted by the thought of what could have been. The rest is history.

It takes a village to make anyone successful, even for a genius and visionary like Bezos. He attended public schools as a young boy. The state built the infrastructure that he and his company depended on initially and continue to. And then there are the institutional systems and other state provisions that have allowed his companies to prosper. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of workers who Amazon has employed over the years were educated at taxpayer expense. There is no question that Mr. Bezos owes a huge debt to society.

That sort of debt is repaid primarily in the form of taxes. As an engineer, I always find it helpful when things can be quantified. Ideally, we as a society could figure out how much Mr. Bezos took from us on his way to becoming a centibillionaire. We could then amortize that amount and have him and his company pay us over time. But that kind of individualized assessment would be fiendishly complex. So we resort to levels of tax rates that apply to broad categories of people and businesses.

There is some inherent inequity in that system of debt collection. The levels of risk that individuals and companies take, and the amounts of sacrifices they make, will always differ both quantitatively and qualitatively. In a country as large as America, there is often a good bit of disparity across geographies in the quality of infrastructure and social provisions. There are numerous other variables that would have to be accounted for in determining who should pay what. Again, because of the impossibility of that task, we generalize taxation.

Societies rely on their economists and politicians to determine “optimal” tax rates. Policymakers must attempt to strike a fine balance between two competing interests: collection of enough revenues to fund the large numbers of government programs while ensuring that the likes of Mr. Bezos and their companies are kept motivated to continue taking risks and making sacrifices to create even more wealth.

Everywhere one looks across the world today, there is heated debate about how much wealthy people like Mr. Bezos, and the highly profitable corporations they lead, should pay in taxes. In the U.S., the top marginal tax rate is currently set at 37 percent. At one point, in 1944-45, it was as high as 94 percent. That was at the height of WWII. The question is, in normal times, would many people bother to make strenuous efforts to create extra wealth if beyond a certain threshold, they could only keep six cents out of every additional dollar they make.

Granted, few people, if anyone, would propose a top marginal tax rate anywhere near 90 percent today. But I haven’t heard anyone say with any level of authority what the number should be. If in general, setting tax rates is an inexact science, what then constitutes someone’s fair share of taxes?

According to published data by Tax Foundation, for tax year 2022, the wealthiest Americans, classified as the top one percent, paid 40.4 percent of federal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers paid just 3 percent of federal income taxes. Tax Foundation says this shows that the U.S. federal income tax system is quite progressive.

People like Mr. Bezos argue that they already pay disproportionate amounts of money into federal coffers. The rest of us tend to disagree. Even when we grudgingly acknowledge that fact, we add that the ultra-wealthy can afford to pay a lot more. We find it unacceptable that significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot afford basics like food, healthcare and housing, while the one-percenters hoard gargantuan amounts of wealth.

The one certainty is that tax rates will keep moving up and down as governments come and go. In general, Democratic administrations champion high tax policies, while Republicans favor low taxation. Whatever the tax rates are at any given time, wealthy individuals and corporations often manage to employ an assortment of tax-minimization strategies to lower their obligations. They do so by hiring armies of lawyers and accountants who exploit loopholes in the tax code. It has been widely reported over the years that using such schemes, rich people are sometimes able to shrink their tax obligations to single-digit-percentages of their incomes. Those who accuse the wealthy of not paying their fair share frequently point to such tax-avoidance schemes, which they say average Americans are unable to take advantage of.

Tax avoidance is not tax evasion, which is illegal. By finding ways to minimize their taxes, the wealthy are not engaging in criminality. Congress can eliminate those opportunities if it wants to by closing the loopholes that rich people exploit.

Since it appears that no one can definitively say what a “fair” tax rate is, we will continue to squabble endlessly with the wealthy. That argument will almost certainly never be settled. Could we perhaps have better luck if we resorted to making moral appeals instead?

Not many of us would be prepared to gamble with our futures the way Mr. Bezos did in 1994. The move he made could quite easily have turned into a disaster. He would have become one of the many casualties of entrepreneurial failures and perhaps go on to live a life of hardship. If that had happened, none of us would know anything about him today. He therefore should be entitled to enjoy the rewards of the enormous risk he took.

Luck plays a huge role in whatever success any individual achieves. Most people who are as lucky as Mr. Bezos has been often acknowledge that they have a duty to help others, since the luck they enjoyed is also quite elusive. My view is that appeal to conscience might be a better approach when trying to convince rich people to share more of their wealth with society. That would require a change of tone.

Some of the public anger directed at the wealthy stems from their ability to leverage their fortune to exercise undue influence over politics, the press, the economy and other facets of society. That sway does have some bearing on the issue of how much taxes rich people pay. But even then, the question about what constitutes fair share of taxes remains.

I am not so sure that constantly directing unflattering language at rich people and calling them names, the way we so often do, will be helpful if we decide to make a moral case. Perhaps we should try talking to the wealthy class nicely for a while and see what happens. We could always go back to pillorying them if they don’t respond positively to our polite appeals.