You have no idea how demoralising it is to look at the price of an expensive guitar or new computer retailing at £1200 and see that £200 of that is VAT added onto the real price of £1000. Even worse with cars. My dad had the luxury of buying a car (and other things) without VAT once upon a time and I guarantee you he would relish the opportunity to do so again
The fact of the matter is the respective governments need to raise tax money. 1. to fix the economy and provide a flow of capital for investments. 2. to pay for their ridiculous, almost imperialist foreign policy of late. 3. A lot of people have decided they don't like paying tax but do like to still use public services.
In the UK's case this would mean care via the NHS, have the Police and Military protection etc. I would genuinely like to see a tax evader get shot and then the UK government turn a blind eye because they were not covered under public services

or indeed the government waste money saving expatriates in oil based dictatorships, who almost certainly don't pay tax, from civil wars
Some successful people also have this 'I am more successful because I am better and work harder than other people' self attribution fallacy which they believe excludes them for tax because it is their money 'that they worked hard for', so allegedly others didn't right
In reality this is the amount of money the market has traded them for their services, in many cases what they have effectively convinced (in a lot of cases exploited) those with capital resource equivalence (money) that their service is worth.
If more of the populace understood macroeconomics we could probably fix this scenario by forcing competition to the point of wage reductions, another way to say demanding a consistently lower price where possible
Furthermore I don't doubt that the wealthy do work hard, long hours, are smart etc. but there are (and most) successful people have had favourable circumstances and probabilities (just do a wiki search), even being middle class counts better relative to coming from a poorer class, bad area, with little opportunity and possibly Jeremy Kyle Show parents

Life itself is the result of how one reacts with millions of probability based events. This very post for example may or may not have an effect on me and others

You can reasonably predict decision making, behaviours, intelligence etc. from environmental conditioning - Scientists have proven this so there is reason to believe that environmental probabilities play a very large role in the success of interacting within that environment. Humans are just too self proud and sometimes narcissistic to understand this, ironically this prevents them from oding so and always try to rationalise everything; ever heard of the 'Black Swan Effect'.
Also if in a basic society there were 1000 people but with only 10 well paying jobs, all things remaining the same, no matter how hard or clever you were there would only still be ten places. I know this is very simplified and could be theoretically changed but you get the picture and besides it is much more complex than that to change, there are a lot of catch 22 scenarios and factors in economics. For these reasons I am an egalitarian
People also need to understand the underlying macroeconomic situation. As China and other cheap labour countries advance their own standard of living and we fail to invest in technologies that will compensate for that there may be a 10-20 year shortfall where our standard of living will go down regardless as we wait for these technologies to bring the price of goods back down. A couple of things may cost double the price but then again we have never lived so well so I guess we will just have to purchase less frequently and hold onto technology for longer; not bad considering its current frenetic pace until technology reduces prices
The people I feel sorry for are those who wages do not allow them a comfortable lifestyle, I will try my best to help you guys out. Then again my generation has to look forward higher tax rates, buying a house for twice the price (inflation adjusted) than it was decade ago with relatively very little change (the same) earnings
