I'm a big fan of Thomas Piketty's idea of a progressive global tax on wealth. I think that the root cause of a lot of the financial stress that many people are

I'm a big fan of Thomas Piketty's idea of a progressive global tax on wealth. I think that the root cause of a lot of the financial stress that many people are feeling right now is the result of having too many people leeching off of passive income from their investments/wealth (derived from work they did 30 years ago) and not actually contributing anything new to society. These wealthy people have become parasites. Right now, if I build an office building and I rent it out to people; assuming that I manage to stay afloat during the first few years, the passive income that I will later generate from that investment will probably keep coming in for the rest of my life... Even worse than that; when I die, my children would be able to keep getting the free passive income; they could just sit there and consume stuff (make others work for them) without working themselves; without contributing anything new to society. There is a point when you have to stop paying these passive earners. We're already doing it when it comes to patents/copyrights (In many countries, copyrights expire after 70 years or so... Patents generally expire sooner than that) - We need to either extend this notion of 'expiry' to ALL property rights OR at the very least tax that wealth. Why should regular property be treated any differently than intellectual property? Right now, what we have is crony capitalism. If we wanted to have proper capitalism; companies like Ford, GM, Toyota... would all have to pay royalties to the descendants of the people who invented the wheel and also to all the descendants of the people who discovered iron ore, etc... That would be fair - Actually, doing this would probably have the same effect as passive income since probably every human has at least one person in their ancestry who made a major contribution to mankind (why don't they get royalties for that?). When you put it into context, the rules of our current flavor of capitalism just seem ridiculously arbitrary. I think that a progressive global tax on wealth combined with basic income would be a perfect way to average out the unfairness of the system without damaging the capitalist incentive structure.