This is a different problem and has to do with privacy. The government can't compel you to disclose everything you're doing without cause, and without due process.

Having a court ordered judgement entered against you is cause and is a result of due process. It's an entirely different scenario.

Assuming that a wealth tax was passed, wouldn't the cause here be proper reporting and collection of said tax? You can declare illegal income on your federal return and pay taxes on it. They're not (in this hypothetical I guess?) asking what you're doing, just how much it's made you.

The issue is that people can change how they own things so they don't have to disclose. The law is necessarily public and people can adjust the way they structure ownership accordingly.

We see this all the time already. For example, Medicaid won't pay for your extremely expensive end of life care if you have assets. So, people give away their assets (to a trust, to family) before applying for Medicaid to cover their nursing home. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. People will adjust where they can to avoid tax.

This also already happens with income tax. For example, executive compensation is primarily provided as capital gains rather than income because it's much more tax efficient. Everything is in the open.

The other issue here is one of cost. The IRS has to fund the cost of analyzing filings and deciding to audit. This is very different from a post-judgement scenario.

And the added problem that the assets need to be valued to tax them - for liquid assets this will be much more challenging than income. Things like CGT or income tax happen at the same time as a transaction in dollars so they are easy to value. Wealth taxes would be open to gaming using the same process you describe here.

I don't think there's really any way around this. It just lowers the maximum amount you can extract via that tax. You have to tax at a rate low enough where it's not worth the expense to get around it in the first place. Maybe this is enough to make a wealth tax altogether not worth it federally (how much does it cost to set up a trust and transfer assets? can't be a lot), I don't know. But I think that's all part of the calculus of whether or not it's reasonable to institute the tax in the first place.

The IRS has no trouble prying and finding out that you have unreported income. The idea that they can’t find out you have an unreported Picasso painting that you bought for 40 million or a beachfront mansion is silly.

We recently ditched privacy so I think we're getting closer to being able to have a wealth tax.

Roe's finding of a fundamental right to privacy in the 14th amendment is VERY different from the rights provided by the 4th amendment, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It's a very different thing.

Love the leap & parody here. As if laws exist independently of who they are enforced against.

The tax & plane seizures are

1. A surprising departure from the rules and norms - I assume probably illegal.

2. Part of a campaign designed to ruin Russia.

You might have misunderstood the argument the anti-taxers (pro-property?) people are bringing up. There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all. The fact that wealth confiscation is being deployed against Russians is no surprise from that perspective and not undermining the core argument.

However, if it makes you feel better, I do agree that given that the War on Terror was pointed inwards fairly quickly I expect the techniques used in the War on Russia's Economy will also move to US home soil in the next decade and there may well be large scale wealth confiscation in the US.

We have this set of tools already. It’s called civil asset forfeiture and it’s a travesty.

>There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all.

But this does not apply to us when we seize Russian assets? By your very logic if seizing wealth is so problematic, well we just seized a whole lot of wealth. I don't think this example actually works here.

No, because the goal with sanctions is explicitly to cause this kind of economic damage by denying capital to the country under sanctions.

It would be bad if we did this to ourselves. We do it to our enemies to hurt them.

We want to damage ourselves by sanctioning others? You said that taking others wealth makes people lose trust in you and therefore hurts yourself. So I don't see why we would do that on purpose.

I think you're confusing me with someone else. I didn't say anything about trust.

But, I suspect the other guy was referring to trusting in economic stability. I don't think there's any reason why sanctions against bad actors like Russia might undermine trust in American investments.

What law prohibits the seizure of foreign assets on international waters?

I dunno. I'm not a lawyer. Possibly one of the ones against piracy?

If you want to make the argument that it is literal and raw might-makes-right on the high seas, ok. But that type of barbarian world is not one I encourage and it'd be a bit stunning to find someone who wants the world to work that way.

The US wouldn't do well in a world like that either, US citizens have more assets to seize than foreigners do.

There's a certain irony in picking this high horse to ride, when we're taking about the response to a western european ground-war in the year 2022.

As if that's not evidence of far more barbaric mechanisms at play in geopolitics...

Has stealing random stuff from Russians helped? I'm not a maritime lawyer or an expert on how war in the 2020s looks, but I don't think Russia was sailing troops into the Ukraine on billionaire pleasure yachts.

There is a pretty good chance this is just making people feel bad and making it harder to normalise the situation. This is action is literally not helping, and is a breach of good norms against stealing. It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.

I wouldn't call it stealing so much as temporarily seizing stolen property. The oligarch's live on almost exclusively ill-gotten gains.

> It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.

Any Russian billionaires that don't realize that this is more of Putin's incompetence than western antagonism deserve a random punitive gesture.

In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.

I'm still not following. How do you think this has helped the situation? What do you expect to happen differently in the future that will be to our benefit?

Maybe I've missed out on some life experiences, but I've never seen petty theft help defuse a tense situation. It is not going to be beneficial to achieving a sane outcome.

> In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.

This is wishful thinking. All of the thievery was done by NATO - there is a very high chance that they will identify NATO as the threat to them.

And if they do blame Putin (which I think is unlikely, groups tend to close ranks when threatened) how is that supposed to help? What are the billionaires supposed to do that the Ukraine military or US State Department can't do? Billionaires aren't that big compared to a government military.

Why would you expect your day to day interactions to act as framework for how members of a warring nation displacing millions and killing innocents under the guise of "nazi hunting" should react to things?

And you're vehemently argue against points that have been known for months, the oligarchs are deeply unhappy with Putin over what has happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/29/russia-oliga...

Putin may have them under his thumb, but that doesn't mean they should be left to their comfort rather than forced to face the direct consequences of Putin's actions.

1. You're linking the Washington Post. Do you want me to go find an article on RT that says the Oligarchs are united against the US? That is a long article claiming to know things that they can't and don't know and is political propaganda to help push this terrifying US proxy war.

2. What do you expect to happen here? How do you think these thefts have helped the situation? Even if you want to argue that these people now hate Putin, they are powerless. The west just stripped them of all their assets.

There's an entire profession who's job it is to go full scale threat modeling on assets held directly or indirectly by the extremely rich. Seems likely they either didn't account for war sanctions or thought the impacted assets would not be worth putting behind 10 proxy legal owners for the unlikely case of such sanctions. Yachts and planes seem like they'd be particularly hard to turn into assets owned by a local proxy entity, since they move around so much.

Yachts and planes are physical objects and represent a tiny, tiny fraction of a billionaire's wealth.

Wealth is actual ownership interest in valuable companies, which can be moved offshore or the person can renounce citizenship and relocate to a country with friendlier tax laws in the extreme case.

Renouncing citizenship has something like a 20%-of-net-worth tax

Might still be worth it if there were a significant wealth tax and you did it in advance of an IPO or other event that greatly increased your net worth.

A wealth tax would also have the effect that people expecting to generate lots of wealth would just move somewhere else to do so, or not come to the US in the first place.

Wait, is that what you always see as the argument against it?

Whenever I've seen it brought up it's always that it would require a constitutional amendment (specifically in the US). The federal government isn't allowed to do taxes that way under the current system (Article 1 Clause 2 Section 3).

Hell, the feds weren't even allowed to do a straight income tax until the 16th amendment.

Washington thought it was fine https://www.npr.org/2019/09/12/760148148/episode-956-the-car...

Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point. Who knows, perhaps that's astroturfing by troll teams employed by billionaires to try and discourage the masses. As you said, they've already got plenty of lawyers to work on it from the constitutional end - including 6 of the lawyers on the Supreme Court.

> Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point.

Huh. Weird. Well, I don't see it brought up on HN all that often (once a month tops?), so we must hang out in different circles outside of here.

Anyways, you have a good one.

It’s easier to collect from foreign billionaires who don’t have the connections. Igor will probably not fund your re-election campaign, but Musk might.

Russian oligarch yacht seizures are a better argument for them than for you. They're worth tens of billions of dollars, and all the US can get is a nine figure boat.

Don’t forget the homes in London, and the billions in frozen bank accounts. Aka everything not in Russia or China.

So, 10% of their net worth by leveraging what was thought to be illegal and unexpected seizures? Most of which was done by the EU. Sounds like a ringing endorsement of how the US would implement a tax that the wealthy can prepare for and happens within the rule of law.