I disagree with a wealth tax, but for a completely different reason[1]: it's very hard to value assets and any attempt to do so will lead to weird distortions o

I disagree with a wealth tax, but for a completely different reason[1]: it's very hard to value assets and any attempt to do so will lead to weird distortions of the market. Let's say I'm a billionaire looking to avoid paying higher taxes. Well, first thing I'll do is avoid having my money in public stocks, because those are inherently easy to value. So I'll try to keep my money in private investments and then hire plenty of accountants and lawyers to argue that those private investments are worth as little as possible. If I really want to get crafty, I go out and buy hard-to-value assets like paintings and Romanian forest land. Valuing a company with cash flow is hard enough, but certainly my team of experts can find a way to say that I vastly overpaid on my new picasso and that it's now worth much much less (even if that's not true). And in any case, are we really gonna have tax assessors enter people's homes to evaluate their art collections? And if not, what's to stop me from claiming that the painting got damaged and isn't worth much anymore? To take another example, let's use WeWork as an example. At it's height, WeWork was "valued" at $47 billion. That means that Adam Neumann, as 30% owner, was "worth" ~$16 billion. With a 1% wealth tax, he'd owe $160M in taxes on a valuation that was probably 10x higher than reality. Of course, in a world with wealth taxes, you'd always find a way to structure a deal so that you can effectively claim that it's worth less, but the point is that any wealth tax is inevitably going to be unfairly applied because of the shenanigans some people will go to to pretend that their wealth is worth much less. [1] I'm not inherently against higher taxes on the wealthy, particularly estate/inheritance taxes, but I do want to see them applied reasonably.