If I sell my house, there's a reasonable expected range of money I can expect for it.

If a majority stock holder in a company sells all of their stock, the price first the first share sold is likely going to be completely different (and substantially less!) than the last share sold.

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slg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"It's difficult to accurately value" isn't an argument against taxing net worth. It's like the old (likely apocryphal) Winston Churchill joke, "We already established what type of woman you are, now we are just haggling over price". Just take whatever the proposal is, cut in half, quarter, or whatever fraction you want and you no longer have an argument against it.

Personally my favorite idea for this stuff that I have heard thrown around is to allow people to self value everything. However, that self valuation then becomes a price tag. Let a billionaire's accountants put their own evaluation on their equity in a business. But that becomes a binding offer and some other billionaire could come along and buy them out at that valuation. That creates pricing pressure in both directions, the person is prevented from underpricing their assets due to the threat of another buyer coming in and a person is prevented from overpricing because it increases their taxes. And suddenly all the problems regarding how the government appraises these things disappears.

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jandrewrogers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Forcing people to write a call option on their property without an offsetting risk premium only sounds like a good idea if you neither understand the implications nor the math. Asset values would collapse because risk would go to the moon.

And that ignores that it trivially enables large-scale exploitation and looting by construction.

	▲	slg 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>without an offsetting risk premium Once again, this is simply haggling over price. Name the premium you think is justified and add that into the law.

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kerenskiy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't get it. What if the person doesn't want to sell at all? Self-value at +inf and pay 1% of that?

	▲	slg 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Society has already decided that we can compel people to sell their private property for fair compensation via eminent domain. Plus getting the assets in the hands of people who value them more certainly creates utility and presumably increases the tax base via further development. This type of forced sale happens all the time with public companies. For example, only like 60% of Twitter shareholders approved the sale to Musk, but the other 40% were forced to go along with it regardless of their preference. If Musk can do that to other people, why should some hypothetically richer person not be able to do it to Musk? And to repeat myself for a third time, we don't need to haggle over price. If we only want this to apply to billionaires, assets worth $50 millions, or whatever, that's fine. If one of the people impacted truly doesn't want to sell, let them set the price as high as makes them feel safe. I'm not going to lose any sleep over taxing the emotional desires of billionaires.