Taxpayers always want to pay less to the tax man. Still, there’s nothing inevitable about low taxes. In the early 1950s, coming out of World War II, the top federal income tax rate exceeded 90 percent. In 1980, the top marginal rate was 70 percent for families making more than $215,400 — about $587,000 in current dollars. And these families pocketed a much smaller share of the nation’s income than they do now. Today, people earning over $200,000 a year capture more than a third of national income.

How we got from that country to this one — where President Obama’s attempt to raise the top federal rate to 39.6 percent from 36 percent sets off partisan warfare — had less to do with changing beliefs about fairness than with politics. By the mid-1970s, the Republican Party concluded it was probably more effective to counter Democrats’ Big Government platform as the party of low taxes than as the party of budget discipline.

Economics helped them make their case. The sharp fall in tax rates that brought us to where we are today was buttressed by an economic proposition that has guided policy ever since: that raising taxes could backfire and harm the economy along the way.

Legend has it the idea entered the political mainstream during a meeting in Washington in 1974 in which the economist Arthur Laffer demonstrated the principle to Donald Rumsfeld, chief of staff to then-President Gerald Ford, and Dick Cheney, an assistant to the president. He drew a curve on a cocktail napkin — now known as the Laffer curve — to illustrate how tax revenues would increase less and less as tax rates rose until they reached a point where any future increase reduced the amount of money raised.

If taxes were too high, Mr. Laffer argued, people would come up with ways to avoid or evade them. They might postpone or cancel investments if the government were to tax away a large share of the rewards. They might work less, or put less effort into it. In this way, high taxes could reduce the total tax haul. More worryingly, this behavior would ultimately slow economic growth.

Economists today broadly accept this understanding of people’s actions. This belief has supported big declines in tax rates around the developed world, from Japan to Britain and the United States to Sweden.