Norway's wealth tax starts at ~$200K and has minor discounts for main residence and volatile shares, but that's about it. And, yes, it is often possible to tak

Norway's wealth tax starts at ~$200K and has minor discounts for main residence and volatile shares, but that's about it. And, yes, it is often possible to take dividends from an established, profitable business - but it is horrible for the way the startup (and investment in distant future) economy works, which is likely pg's frame of reference - I start a company, a very promising one, but it needs 20 years and billions of capital to get there. I raise $30M, still keeping 50% of my company at this point; Oops; on paper, I'm worth $30M, and have to pay (at e.g. 1%) $300K wealth tax in the first year. I cannot get any dividend; I usually can't even sell my shares or borrow against them. And it gets worse each time the company valuation grows (whether I raise more money or not). Seems far fetched? That's Amazon. Okay, Amazon is one in a million you say - but notice that the bad parts apply to ALL founded companies, whether or not they were as successful as Amazon. So, in addition to the wealth tax, something's got to give. Either you exclude non-liquid assets (which is a huge hole that will render wealth tax moot). Or you accept wealth-tax-payment-in-kind (that is, you put 1% of your shares into government custodianship every year, and then can convert them to tax money whenever this becomes a possibility). Or, the entire investment world changes - either investors will have to get used to paying an extra 1.5% to cover the founder's tax liability; or valuations will drop an order of magnitude to let founders pay out of their own pocket. Or investment will be diverted to places that don't have this tax. Or it will just drop significantly. But the assumption that wealth tax will have minor (if any) effect is ridiculous. Somewhat comparably, Israel put a very small turnover tax on stock exchange trading (which is not wealth tax, but is close enough for practical purposes) and as a result, the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange volumes went down by an order of magnitude.