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That logic doesn't really apply when you scale up to the ultra-billionaires. Shares of stock are plenty liquid.

• jl2718 5y ago
  Unless the float is much smaller than the cap.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  The rest of it still applies. It makes the numbers not work for starting a business. Besides, selling off pieces of it means making less and less money off of it. You wind up working for the people you sold it to in order to pay the taxes. You might as well kiss entrepreneurship goodbye with wealth taxes.
  • rtpg 5y ago
    There is such a stupidly easy solution to this, which is to set a lower limit for whatever rule applies. Though... even though things like estate taxes have these rules (either "first million isn't taxed" or "primary residence isn't taxed" etc, depending on jursidiction), most people tend to not actually read the details and assume that the gov't wants to take the family farm. No, I don't think it's your god-given right to hand down a $2 million townhouse without paying taxes.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      You don't have the god-given right to take it, either :-) Taxes should be extracted as needed to support things that only government can do. Taxes should not be extracted based on envy, or just because they can be.
      • rtpg 5y ago
        Taxes are a tool in the toolbox to organizing society for progress as a whole. I think that making it so that people who have a lot of accumulated wealth are asked to put more into the collective coffers is an extremely obvious and fair-ish way of doing things. Much more so than dumb things like "roads should be paid for by gas taxes" (we don't pay for libraries with book taxes! Or schools with child labor income tax!)