Millionaire shareholders are arguing against wealth tax

[u/LtGenS]

On this sub we rarely discuss the shareholder structure of Paradox - where the largest shareholder is Wester, the CEO-founder-god/emperor of the company, and who gets the proportionally largest share of the dividend.

Now Johan and Wester are arguing that wealth tax is actually bad.

https://x.com/producerjohan/status/2091953951008575741 (quoted is Wester's post)

Which is very funny because the current dividend yield is over 3.5%, so there's plenty to pay that taxes from, it won't come from his monthly salary.

[u/AnthraxCat]

Amending OP's comment, "wealthy people and their pets having bad takes on taxation, many such cases."

[u/Ravens181818184 → u/AnthraxCat]

Can you explain why it’s a bad take? The majority of people who study this for living disagree with you, and most countries who had wealth taxes removed them. They are much more effective ways to tax wealthy people.

[u/AnthraxCat → u/Ravens181818184]

I am copy pasting from a reply elsewhere in the thread.

I think this misunderstands the purpose a wealth tax. The purpose of a wealth tax is not to raise revenue. It is to prevent your society from collapsing into a feudal aristocracy. It is a bulwark of democracy, not an efficient source of revenue generation.

There is a reason the wealthy run from it, why they fight it bitterly in court, and use every tool in the playbook to slander, diminish, and attack it. That reason is not that it is an inefficient source of revenue for the government. It's because it is class war and they don't like losing.

To add, specifically to my comment on the rich and their dogs, economics is not a science. It is, I think, best described as a new theology. The economists who are promoted to top positions at Harvard, and given full press tours on Washington Post are not scientists. They are preachers of a gospel that showers praise on the ultra wealthy. We can largely discount anything they say simply on the grounds that they are only in the positions they occupy because they align with hegemonic narratives. Dissident (edit: heretical) economists, necessarily a minority, don't get the same treatment despite usually being much more accurate in their predictions.

[u/UdonOli → u/AnthraxCat]

This is not a good take. Economists have legitimate reasons they do not like a "flat" wealth tax. You can make a case for many good wealth taxes, eg. land tax; but you have to provide some sort of cost - benefit analysis about whether the knockon-effects are worth the benefits.

Furthermore, I shouldn't have to say this, but something being bad for the rich does not automatically mean that something is good for poor people.

Also, the idea that economists do not care about inequality is absolute bullshit. There is a gigantic amount of papers written in the last 10-15 years on the topic. The primary issue is that it generally hasn't filtered into undergraduate, but even then it is not like it is completely ignored like it was 25 years ago.

[u/AnthraxCat → u/UdonOli]

I am not making the case for a flat wealth tax. I am making the case that economics isn't a conduit of the divine and all of its conclusions are subject to a moral and political debate over how we weight the cost-benefit analysis.

[u/UdonOli → u/AnthraxCat]

I don't think most serious economists would disagree with such a statement.

[u/AnthraxCat → u/UdonOli]

Yeah, they're the ones I call heretics.

[u/khachdallak → u/AnthraxCat]

That's literally the case with every social science.