> The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth.

I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).

> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly

I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.

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bryanlarsen an hour ago | parent [-]

> I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

The modern capitalistic system has devised many fabulous ways of enabling people to buy ice cream machines and seed corn without being able to afford it individually. Equity and loans are the two most obvious, there are many more.

That is the main reason that American capitalism has thrived. Because you don't have to be rich to buy ice cream machines.

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roenxi an hour ago | parent [-]

Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages.

The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.

	▲	bryanlarsen 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> better measure than profit Exactly. We should be taxing profit less and wealth more.