So maybe "art, gold, land, and 600 years of government that respects the continuity of property holdings of their subjects".

That's a pretty rare occurrence. IIRC France and Italy(or actually various states occupying this territory throughout history) qualify here.

Not sure about Germany with its cycles of partition and unification but everything east of Berlin to the Ural mountains is out of the question.

We need to tax wealth, not income, to increase social mobility. Taxing income hurts entrepreneurs, taxing wealth pushes the idle rich to work harder.

Taxing wealth will only increase the mobility of the wealthy.

Luckily at least you're alive. In my country whole social class was wiped out after ww2.

> After World War II, Czechoslovakia, the predecessor of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, acting to seize what they considered to be German possessions, expropriated the entirety of the Liechtenstein dynasty's hereditary lands and possessions in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia which compose the Czech Republic. The expropriations (which were the subject of an unsuccessful court case brought by Liechtenstein in the German courts and the International Court of Justice) included over 1,600 km² (which is ten times the size of Liechtenstein) of agricultural and forest land mostly in Moravia, also including several family castles and palaces.

Yup.

Feudal holdings require feudal power.

Nevermind that the lands were private property and not feudal holdings.

I would say it worked until the world changed in such a way that old systems were entirely dismantled.

But even in previous eras that system of wealth preservation only worked when it worked. If the invading army was never expelled, your land could be lost. And carrying all those valuables around with you while fleeing, well I'm sure people still got robbed sometimes. So it wasn't a foolproof solution. But there were limited options, and maybe not a better options.

Even now, what's the solution for wealth preservation in times of upheaval and displacement? I have no idea. Right now most of us trust in the banking system to some degree and that's only good as long as the system stands. If it collapses we're all boned and might wish for a bit more art, gold, and land to fall back on.

This does all sort of go out of the window once the worst case scenario becomes "the government steals everything from you and kills you if you resist."

Careful with the terminology there. "Stealing" is only really meaningful in the context of a legal framework, which happened to change in most places in Europe around the turn of the 20th century.

I'm more inclined to frame it in terms of an outdated, inegalitarian social order being overturned, resulting in massive upheaval and atrocities due to the power vacuum being rapidly filled again by the most ruthless actors.

It's still stealing even if it's called "eminent domain" or "civil asset forfeiture". It's basically stealing backed by little green men with guns.

my family was in the same boat but never got any compensation, probably partly due to the territory being swapped to a different sovereign nation ( old Poland -> contemporary Ukraine)

Exactly the same kind of shift here.

That being said the compensation, IIRC, didn't cross 10k PLN, so divided between all people entitled it wasn't much.

Relevant Article: Poland's lost property https://www.ft.com/content/be98d9aa-360d-11df-aa43-00144feab...