There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):
This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.
Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415
One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.
The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.
You can read about this in:
Hayek, for a right-wing liberal perspective, called ‘conservative’ in the US today,
Piketty, for a left-wing liberal perspective, called ‘liberal’ in the US today, or
The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.
There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):
This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.
Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415
One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.
The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.
You can read about this in:
The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=t9l7AYl0jUE
https://piped.video/watch?v=XlhFMa4t28A&t=3901s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.