Most (all?) states have varrious schemes that fix or greatly diminish property taxes at least for your home... (California does so for all property). So it's g

Most (all?) states have varrious schemes that fix or greatly diminish property taxes at least for your home... (California does so for all property). So it's generally possible to do the upfront accounting work to cover them (e.g. set aside enough additional funds in interest bearing investments to pay them in perpetuity). And there is a liquid market in property at least, for some definition of liquidity, which makes it possible to sell and possible to set some kind of price. Real property also lacks the significant privacy invasion and personal information problems that arise with other kinds of property-- since real property is inherently non-private in some sense (otherwise it's a hole in a map :) ). For many other kinds of valuable assets there really may be no liquid market and any prices you would ascribe are just pure conjecture and fiction. It may well be difficult for the owner to even know they own it, or what its condition is, without ongoing costly auditing, etc. I'll grant you that it's a counter argument, but I don't know that it's a good one. Before someone suggests that a wealth tax could be applied to publicly traded equities that avoided most of these issues-- perhaps, but at the cost of tremendous market distortion as people tried to pull wealth into things other than equities, greatly harming everyone else who isn't hyper rich and doesn't have a lot of investment opportunities outside of the public markets. Just take a look at the absurd california wealth tax proposals-- the amount of abjectly insane personal invasion required to try to close off escapes requiring billions of dollars in funding while still basically letting some unelected board nail people under suspicious of not paying enough, it's truly remarkable. One doesn't have to care at all about the pocketbooks of the targets to recognize bad public policy, ripe for corrupt exploitation.