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".

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choeger an hour ago | parent [-]

The thing is: You cannot eat, or live inside, or get medical treatment from, stocks.

Wealth taxation cannot redistribute the kind of wealth we care about most. At least not by itself.

You need someone to buy the stocks in exchange for labor. So you need to keep the stocks themselves valuable.

As an extreme example, if you'd just take away all the SpaceX and Tesla stock from all shareholders and redistribute them, they would probably be near worthless because you just demonstrated that their value is more or less random.

I think that wealth taxation will only work if you give ironclad guarantees that people that are merely rich or middle-class will never be subject to it. If you can show that a stock is more valuable to, say, a medical doctor, then to the CEO of a hyperscaler, you might have a working system.

	▲	vincnetas 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But somehow these rich people take loans of real money that they buy real things for. So it looks like you could eat or live from stocks.
	▲	angusturner an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The main purpose of wealth tax is not redistribution, but curbing the tide of power concentration. If large fortunes keep doing 5-7% per year compounding, outpacing the avg. growth rate of economy, wages etc. then we keep ending up with Musk-like figures with such outsized amounts of power and influence that it basically destabilizes democracy altogether. You can't get rid of these people because they just have too much influence -- i mean, literally buying entire social media platforms. C'mon. Its really just a question about whether you want society to continue functioning with some semblance of fairness and stability.