Maybe instead of depending on the sporadic largesse of billionaires and all the awful political and economic consequences that come along with that kind of wealth concentration, we can have a functioning safety net, like the rest of the developed world.

The Canadian corporate tax rate is just 15%, and even Trudeau is pursuing aggressive neo-liberal policies. Canada would happily take our billionaires. (So would other English-speaking countries. Ireland, the U.K., and Canada have been the destination for dozens of corporate inversions over the last couple of decades.)

The U.S. is already the least economically free country in the Anglosphere: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking. Do we really need to test how much we can squander our prosperity by being to the left of countries like France? https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/emmanuel-macron-cont...

Especially when it's unnecessary? Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, even on paper, will raise a fraction of the revenue that a VAT would. (Which Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and Australia all have, unlike the wealth tax.)

I don't know what economic freedom means, but the last time I checked, the US is doing just fine in the Capital department.

And a VAT is highly unpopular.

As to VAT being “unpopular”—that’s a very odd statement. The US is the only OECD country without a VAT. (By contrast, a dozen OECD countries have no taxes at all on long term capital gains.)

Easy yes, cheap no.

Considering that Hong Kong is at the top of that list, it tells me that maybe "economic freedom" is not necessarily the thing to optimize for.

Or to put it in other terms, I don't believe that any singular -ism is the solution.

> As to VAT being “unpopular”—that’s a very odd statement.

How is that odd? We have an economy driven heavily by consumption, a VAT would make everything more expensive and would be seen as a tax on the poor and middle class.

It certainly seems like one of the dimensions to optimize for, considering that also ahead of the U.S. on that list are pretty great places like Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. Also Singapore and Taiwan, places that went from poverty to prosperity in a couple of generations thanks to economic freedom.

> How is that odd? We have an economy driven heavily by consumption, a VAT would make everything more expensive and would be seen as a tax on the poor and middle class.

It's odd to say that something that has been universally adopted by the liberal democracies of every other OECD country is "unpopular."

This is some weird ideological bullshit. There is plenty of evidence that capital hurts markets and therefore society with those lacking capital ending up competitive and beneficial for society providing cheap high quality products and services, and those influenced by capital ending up monopolistic rent seeking monsters used against society to protect wealth.

This doesn't really follow at all, and is directly in contradiction with your desire to get rid of Prop 13. Property taxes are the most common wealth tax!

DOS and Windows weren't the most glorious software to ever stalk the Earth, they were the operating systems that happened to get popular on cheap hardware. Arguing that Bill Gates created all that wealth that comes with the network effect inherent in software and a homeowner is unduly appropriating community value is really something or other.

So, sure, he was lucky in a way, to be around and read it, but it seems unfair to say he merely appropriated value that belonged to everyone. The advice was worthless to the person giving it away, and everyone else.

I mean, there is actual historical evidence of other cheap operating systems for cheap computers and so on.

Likewise, the results of hoarding the vast wealth in the forms of property, land, legal entities that operate and depend on these same communities which generated them is damagingly extractive.

We should, too, somewhat reverse the hoarding of vast wealth and let our communities reap some benefit from the treasures they are capable of producing.

> get rid of assorted insanity such as Prop 13 in CA

Aren't these slightly contradictory views?

Property tax is a form of wealth tax (in that it's a tax on assets rather than income) and Prop 13 puts a cap on it.

Also, capital is not a scarce resource in the US today. For firms that would be worth investing in but don't have access to capital on reasonable terms, the reason for their lack of access is a combination of incentive problems and inefficiency on the part of e.g. VC firms, not because the capital isn't out there. It's true that a wealth tax would increase the cost of equity, but the Finance 101 strategy of "only initiate a project if the IRR of the expected cashflows is greater than the cost of equity" isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.

If by "those who need capital the most" you mean charities and not startups, a wealth tax would just incentivize giving more to charities and doing it sooner.

Mostly, it doesn't. It boosts the value of specific, scarce assets. The increase in e.g. land values that's directly attributable to government spending is a lot more tangible than any fuzzy effect on rates of return for capital. This makes most government spending basically a transfer from the productive (labor and capital) to the rent-seekers, but that has nothing to do with capital per se.

> isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.

Uncertain cashflows make the effect more meaningful, not less. Few investors will be well-positioned to fund a firm with hard-to-assess future cashflow, so capital is meaningfully scarce for those firms.

You’re engaging in a slight of hand. Leaving aside capital gains taxes, returns on capital are taxed as income when companies pay dividends. So the income tax covers both returns to labor and returns to capital.

I think HN has almost zero of the first category, and some mixture of categories two and three.