Oh dear, I bet those billionaires probably also drove on public roads. They’re taking advantage of us@!
No, he doesn’t. Break-up in 19th century aristocratic land wealth is a fundamentally different thing than modern economic structures. Particularly as land is land, utterly different than industrial and immaterial IP.
And modern industrial wealth is a different game. Wealth taxes in modern economies have performed very poorly, in both developed and developing worlds, such that most EU has abolished them. That is real world, not academic abstractions. EU not, not anti tax America. So if EU world has found them not effective, it should tell you something.
Your anectdotes about Billionnaires etc are utterly besides the point - that is not a justifiction of Wealth tax qua Wealth tax but of improving tax code to capture income streams that such people have and minimizing the ability to use tax sheltering.
I’d view it as monopolization of capital. For much of history, land was the basic capital, the rich got income from renting it or giving it out for sharecropping. Most of modern wealth is in shares, so the issue is the share of productivity going to capital or to labor. If workers can’t accumulate any capital, then they spend their lives enriching the already wealthy, just as the landowners used their rents to invest in factories/shares in things like the East India Company, etc.
The basic issue is how much the owners of capital extract from workers and how much they give back to the community in taxes. To me, the fact that Musk and Bezos have competing rockets is like the faberge eggs of modern society.
No, the rockets are not in any way like Faberge eggs. They both have real economic goals. Maybe unrealisable ones, even stupid ones maybe, but they’re real economic goals.
Otherwise Land is Land - it’s there. It is not an immaterial assets. It is utterly different than stock ownership and immaterial IP.
Applying real estate taxation ideas to that is just wrong-headed.
Means testing is never cost-effective. just shovel out the money and claw it back with a progressive tax schedule