It became a regular cottage industry in the UK to help wealthy folks, show biz types especially, find other places to live. Roger Moore ended up in Switzerland. Mick Jagger got a nice place in Jamaica. Others flew the coop for places like Spain, France, and South America.
So much for "soaking the rich". They just leave. They've got the money to do it. So who gets stuck with the tax bill then? Same ones as always, the ordinary working schmucks. Why don't people ever call these lousy demagogue politicians when they start spouting their "tax the rich" crap?
I have been "exercising the mind," so to speak, on how to bring true accountability to those that cause these problems and use government force to do damage to the individual. We have a means of recompense through the legal system (I know but it's all we have) so would it be possible to directly sue congressmen for damages such as being forced into defacto exile or being bankrupted by overzealous taxing authorities. I don't think it would be likely to directly sue any elected official because you get into the problem of making any controversial vote becoming nothing more than lawyer bait on both sides (Although I'd love to see Frank & Dodd on the stand having to justify their power to force banks into bad business practices.) Perhaps the individual agents of the government could be directly sued though. Should the local IRS office send one of their minions around to a the clients of a business and tell them they had better not do business with them because there is an investigation coming and they don't want to be involved, then, that particular agent could be sued for damages and quite possibly the chain of command in that IRS office as well.
This is something that would need a better legal mind than mine to work out the details but it would at least bring accountability to the insulated bureaucrats we have now.