>In contrast, if you were to take an individual worth $10 billion, whose entire net worth is derived from the ownership of their stock, and were to tax them 2% of their wealth annually, they would have to somehow come up with $200 million every year to pay the tax
If your $10 billion dollar asset isn't returning you much more than 2% per year, it has a terrible ROI, and you need to divest.
>corporate wealth is NOT zero-sum, it's created.
Not absolutely, but the power represented by the percentage of the world's wealth one controls is finite. At the limit if I own 99% of a countries current wealth, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of the citizens of that country to decide that I have amassed too much power and to rectify that by taxation and redistribution.
That's not how corporate ownership works. It's not about the ROI, it's about ownership in the company you founded / are running.
If your goal is just ROI, then you will willingly divest from your own company, at which point your wealth is taxed as a capital gain.
When we are talking mutli billionaires like Bezos who may be driven by more grandiose incentives like amassing power, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of us to effectively remove some of their control.
In reality, there are loads of people in between: founders of medium size businesses.
The wealth tax is imposed on everyone in this spectrum. The capital gains tax is only imposed on those that amass the most amount of power.
So I'm perfectly OK saying you can't single-handedly control a business larger than $100 million without paying the rest of society extra compensation for maintaining that kind of power.
Seems perfectly fair to me. Power is finite in the same way land is. If controlling a company is valuable to you in some other way other than just amassing power, say you are really behind the mission of going to space, you can reorganize into a non profit.
In contrast, if you were to take an individual worth $10 billion, whose entire net worth is derived from the ownership of their stock, and were to tax them 2% of their wealth annually, they would have to somehow come up with $200 million every year to pay the tax. This is a different proposition altogether, since none of these billionaires have that much money sitting around in cash (or any other asset for that matter). They're just wealthy on paper. The only way to pay that tax would be to either liquidate their holdings, or for their corporations to pay enough in dividends to cover the tax, which is an odd (IMO bad) incentive to create for corporations in general. Even the owner of a $300 million business who owns (say) 30% of their company at a $100 million net worth would have to come up with $2 million in cash every year. Very few CEOs have that kind of cash coming in on a yearly basis, and you're essentially just creating an incentive for corporations to inflate the compensation to their founder CEOs just so that they can maintain ownership in their own company.
A big reason for this disparity between the top 1% value of corporation vs the top 1% value of property is that, unlike land (which is fixed), corporate wealth is NOT zero-sum, it's created. This is a very important distinction, because a lot of the rhetoric around wealth is sometimes based around the idea that there's some fixed amount of wealth in the world, and the rich have just been stealing all of it — no the aggregate wealth has been created at historic levels.
Also Federal property taxes are unconstitutional, which is why it's applied entirely at the state / local level.