Lionel Shriver: Wealth tax peril
The headline tells the story.
(Scott Johnson) Reading the February 26 issue of The Spectator World, I find Lionel Shriver’s column on California’s looming billionaire tax. I have taken up both Ms. Shriver and the billionaire tax on Power Line in recent days. We don’t want to miss this.
Online, the Spectator has headlined her column “No one is safe from a wealth tax.” (In the magazine it’s headlined “The creeping tentacles of a wealth tax.”) Here is the conclusion of her excellent column:
* * * * *
The biggest problem with wealth taxes isn’t logistical but philosophical. Implicitly, there is no ownership. As the state reserves the right to confiscate your assets up to 100 percent, effectively everything you fancy you “own” belongs to the state, and if you’re very, very good the state will let you borrow some stuff from its vast lending library. (Hmm, there’s a word for this system… I think it begins with C.) All that you regard as “yours” you’re merely renting. The wealth tax paradigm duplicates the lucrative business model now popular with tech. We no longer buy Microsoft Word. We rent it by the month.
Wealth tax advocates also play to the vague popular impression that accruing wealth beyond a certain threshold is immoral. Many average-income earners instinctively regard the very existence of billionaires as an injustice. Perhaps there should be a hard ceiling above which no one is allowed to amass more riches, and any excess must be seized and distributed to the less well off.
Except this is a misunderstanding of non-zero-sum economics. Most billionaires haven’t filched money from other people’s wallets and stuffed it in their study safes. A freakish byproduct of capitalism, they’ve generated value, usually by building businesses and hiring employees; adding to rather than extracting from the economy, they’ve baked a bigger pie. Eliminate the billionaire, and you don’t suddenly have a billion dollars to spend on schools and hospitals. The state and its citizenry are poorer. Like California, if it passes this proposition.
Still, for government, wealth taxes are eternally tempting: “All that money…can’t we just take it?” Picture Amahl and the Night Visitors, when Amahl’s mother talks herself into stealing the Magi’s gold: “For my child!… For my child!” So Spain has introduced a “solidarity tax” on any resident’s assets over €3 million ($3.54 million) – a modest net worth, these days. Three-quarters of Britons reckon that a UK wealth tax would be swell.
Think again. Besides chasing away even more of your tax base, you’d set an alarming precedent. Give the state free rein to expropriate what you now nominally own post-tax, and you imagine they’ll only use that new superpower on billionaires? Oh, my pretties. Your innocence is touching.
The headline tells the story.
(Scott Johnson) Reading the February 26 issue of The Spectator World, I find Lionel Shriver’s column on California’s looming billionaire tax. I have taken up both Ms. Shriver and the billionaire tax on Power Line in recent days. We don’t want to miss this.
Online, the Spectator has headlined her column “No one is safe from a wealth tax.” (In the magazine it’s headlined “The creeping tentacles of a wealth tax.”) Here is the conclusion of her excellent column:
* * * * *
The biggest problem with wealth taxes isn’t logistical but philosophical. Implicitly, there is no ownership. As the state reserves the right to confiscate your assets up to 100 percent, effectively everything you fancy you “own” belongs to the state, and if you’re very, very good the state will let you borrow some stuff from its vast lending library. (Hmm, there’s a word for this system… I think it begins with C.) All that you regard as “yours” you’re merely renting. The wealth tax paradigm duplicates the lucrative business model now popular with tech. We no longer buy Microsoft Word. We rent it by the month.
Wealth tax advocates also play to the vague popular impression that accruing wealth beyond a certain threshold is immoral. Many average-income earners instinctively regard the very existence of billionaires as an injustice. Perhaps there should be a hard ceiling above which no one is allowed to amass more riches, and any excess must be seized and distributed to the less well off.
Except this is a misunderstanding of non-zero-sum economics. Most billionaires haven’t filched money from other people’s wallets and stuffed it in their study safes. A freakish byproduct of capitalism, they’ve generated value, usually by building businesses and hiring employees; adding to rather than extracting from the economy, they’ve baked a bigger pie. Eliminate the billionaire, and you don’t suddenly have a billion dollars to spend on schools and hospitals. The state and its citizenry are poorer. Like California, if it passes this proposition.
Still, for government, wealth taxes are eternally tempting: “All that money…can’t we just take it?” Picture Amahl and the Night Visitors, when Amahl’s mother talks herself into stealing the Magi’s gold: “For my child!… For my child!” So Spain has introduced a “solidarity tax” on any resident’s assets over €3 million ($3.54 million) – a modest net worth, these days. Three-quarters of Britons reckon that a UK wealth tax would be swell.
Think again. Besides chasing away even more of your tax base, you’d set an alarming precedent. Give the state free rein to expropriate what you now nominally own post-tax, and you imagine they’ll only use that new superpower on billionaires? Oh, my pretties. Your innocence is touching.
Lionel Shriver: Wealth tax peril
The headline tells the story.
(Scott Johnson) Reading the February 26 issue of The Spectator World, I find Lionel Shriver’s column on California’s looming billionaire tax. I have taken up both Ms. Shriver and the billionaire tax on Power Line in recent days. We don’t want to miss this.
Online, the Spectator has headlined her column “No one is safe from a wealth tax.” (In the magazine it’s headlined “The creeping tentacles of a wealth tax.”) Here is the conclusion of her excellent column:
* * * * *
The biggest problem with wealth taxes isn’t logistical but philosophical. Implicitly, there is no ownership. As the state reserves the right to confiscate your assets up to 100 percent, effectively everything you fancy you “own” belongs to the state, and if you’re very, very good the state will let you borrow some stuff from its vast lending library. (Hmm, there’s a word for this system… I think it begins with C.) All that you regard as “yours” you’re merely renting. The wealth tax paradigm duplicates the lucrative business model now popular with tech. We no longer buy Microsoft Word. We rent it by the month.
Wealth tax advocates also play to the vague popular impression that accruing wealth beyond a certain threshold is immoral. Many average-income earners instinctively regard the very existence of billionaires as an injustice. Perhaps there should be a hard ceiling above which no one is allowed to amass more riches, and any excess must be seized and distributed to the less well off.
Except this is a misunderstanding of non-zero-sum economics. Most billionaires haven’t filched money from other people’s wallets and stuffed it in their study safes. A freakish byproduct of capitalism, they’ve generated value, usually by building businesses and hiring employees; adding to rather than extracting from the economy, they’ve baked a bigger pie. Eliminate the billionaire, and you don’t suddenly have a billion dollars to spend on schools and hospitals. The state and its citizenry are poorer. Like California, if it passes this proposition.
Still, for government, wealth taxes are eternally tempting: “All that money…can’t we just take it?” Picture Amahl and the Night Visitors, when Amahl’s mother talks herself into stealing the Magi’s gold: “For my child!… For my child!” So Spain has introduced a “solidarity tax” on any resident’s assets over €3 million ($3.54 million) – a modest net worth, these days. Three-quarters of Britons reckon that a UK wealth tax would be swell.
Think again. Besides chasing away even more of your tax base, you’d set an alarming precedent. Give the state free rein to expropriate what you now nominally own post-tax, and you imagine they’ll only use that new superpower on billionaires? Oh, my pretties. Your innocence is touching.
