Raising taxes on the rich

The argument over raising taxes on the "rich" is in full bloom.  Obama has come of his pronouncement of a year or so ago that it is a bad idea to raise any taxes in a bad economy by engaging in a class warfare strategy of raising taxes on the rich in the interest of "fairness", and to stir up his base for the coming reelection campaign.  In this article by Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institute we have an abstruse argument to prove Obama, once and for all, to be wrong about raising taxes.  It is abstruse because Epstein, an economist, uses mathematics to demonstrate how even minor rate increases in taxes causes a change in the behavior of those affected, and the concepts are not all that easy to grasp, at least for the mathematics deprived.  A simpler and perhaps more easily understood argument is that by raising taxes and increasing the "take" of the government, we are saying that the government needs more revenue to operate at its present size.  But, isn't that the point?  Conservatives believe that the government is way too big and intrusive and needs to be pared back.  Raising taxes acknowledges that government is not too big as presently constituted and that if anything is perhaps even too small.  Both Epstein's and the size arguments are valid, the latter is simply easier to understand, at least for the layperson.