The vast, vast majority of wealth (to the wealthy) are in form of company ownership, stocks.

So let's say you start taxing the ultra-wealthy based on their assets. They then have the option of:

1) Make the company pay out dividends, so that owners can afford to pay their wealth tax. Not ideal, because what happens during bad years where there's no dividends to be paid out? Or if companies want to re-invest in the company?

2) Sell stocks. Again, not ideal. This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.

3) Take up personal loans to cover taxes.

etc.

Note, I'm NOT saying that we shouldn't do anything. But this is just the consequence of such assets (stocks) being the dominant asset among the wealthy.

Why is 2 a direction to be avoided? Is it really so bad to prevent an individual from having majority voting rights over a corporation which has power on par with most nation states? I’m not sure a billion dollar cap is the answer here but surely there must be some kind of reasonable ceiling. Is it so bad to think that one individual shouldn’t have majority ownership over a company dominant for the US space program? Or control over major international internet access that’s useful during conflicts? Or major social media platforms which provide algorithmic dials to tweak what information is visible?

I think there’s really only a few solutions to it which all involve some kind of divestiture, it just depends on if you want to target corporations or individuals:

1) a new wave of anti-trust ala Lina Khan and breaking up most major tech companies.

2) passing laws limiting the behavior of, and allowing for the punishment of corporations and group agents as a whole. There’s a lot of philosophical work about how to hold a group accountable for their actions, try searching List and Pettit Group Agency. There’s been a lot of development since then but I’m less aware of it.

3. Caps on decision making power (potentially measured via some weighted stock ownership, or wealth more generally) like suggested above. I agree there would be a lot of second order effects here which are beyond the scope of this comment but I think we’ve clearly gone too far in one direction where single individuals are now essentially funding national party midterms, have increasing power over real world conflicts, and any other of the myriad of corruption issues you can find out in the wild.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see much wrong with any of the options above. Most of my assets aren't liquid either, yet I'm still taxed at a much much higher rate (when compared to total assets) than the top. I have to make decisions like "how much will I need good health care coverage next year?", which I shouldn't have to say isn't "ideal" either.

How would losing ownership be a bad thing?

Isn't that exactly what we are trying to achieve by re-distributing the wealth, and avoiding that few people have such huge ownership that they have more power than governments ?

We are still living in a middle-age system, where the lords don't own lands but stocks and companies, but they still dictate the laws.

They can pay with shares into a state fund and the state could even return the voting power. It can be done if we want it. That was in a proposal in French legislation for example, so it's not 100% crazy and to me it seems completely natural.

How is that not the obvious comeback to the argument "wealth is stocks so we can't tax it"? Is there an obvious downside?

A nice idea I heard is to introduce a minimum tax rate based on wealth. Let’s say the magic number is 0.5%. Then you say, every individual (over some threshold etc) needs to pay max(normal tax calculation, 0.5% of wealth) .

What I like about it is that it doesn’t penalize people who already pay taxes. It’s a lower bound, not an extra.

What makes me weary about any such tax is that in practice, it seems to target the broad middle class - people who have enough assets to be interesting to the tax man, but who don’t have enough to hide it or avoid taxes.

You didn't really highlight how any of this is a problem? Yes, if you sell some of your assets, whatever kind, to pay for taxes then you'll have less assets in the end. That's literally how taxes work.

> This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.

What's the problem? It's not like you'll have to sell over 50%. Even then the are schemes for non-voting shares. But when close to 1% of population works for Amazon, maybe forced sharing of ownership isn't a bad idea.

I don't understand the problem.

Besides any argument about fairness, wealth inequality is highly destabilizing and historically has only been corrected by revolutions, wars, crises etc.

If a few billionaires need to sell stocks to avoid such an outcome, that seems quite desirable to me.

Why is 2 not ideal? That is exactly what should happen.

Wealth concentration is a problem because wealth concentration is power concentration.

Why should a few dudes have autocratic control of entire industries?

If you force them to sell off their stakes over time through a wealth tax, you make the economy more democratic.

Um, tough, if you want to be a billionaire, you get to sell a tiny fraction of your assets to pay taxes. If they don't want to sell assets, they can pay themselves a larger salary or something. Or, like you said, take loans which is literally what they do to afford their lifestyles, just use that for taxes. I don't really care which.

"Taxing the rich" is literally solving the thing that is a problem today.

You know what is actually not ideal?

Having hordes of people in poverty while we bend over backwards to not inconvenience the rich with "selling stocks" to pay taxes".