A Wealth Tax Is the Only Tax That Makes Sense

The usual case for a wealth tax is practical: the government needs money, and the richest people have most of it. The usual argument against it is moral, you cannot tax someone for owning what they already own. If a person has to sell stock, land, or part of a company to pay the bill, critics call that theft with nicer paperwork.

I used to find that argument at least coherent. Now I think it has the question backward. A wealth tax may be the only tax that makes sense.

The wealthy love to make the argument that those on assistance are freeloaders and are getting handouts from the government. But in reality, the people most dependent on government are the people with assets. Without police, courts, contracts, prisons, and property law, those assets are only claims waiting to be tested by force. Land, factories, bank deposits, equity stakes, intellectual property, cash. All of it rests on the state's willingness to recognize and defend ownership.

Elon Musk is allowed to be that rich because it is illegal to burn down his factories, seize his companies, empty his accounts, or ignore the contracts that make his wealth legible. That is not a small benefit, it is the whole foundation.

The person with no assets receives much less from that part of the state. The police are not guarding his portfolio. The courts are not enforcing his ownership of a warehouse, a patent library, or a thousand acres of land. If the state is mostly protecting property, then the people with the most property should pay the most for that protection.

The same logic applies to companies. Amazon does not float above the public sector. It drives on public roads, hires workers educated in public schools, relies on courts to enforce contracts, uses public safety systems to keep warehouses and delivery routes operating, and depends on a currency whose stability is maintained by the state. Its trucks help wear down the roads that make its business possible.

A corner store benefits from infrastructure too, but not on the same scale. Amazon's dependence is larger because Amazon is larger. The state lets it operate across cities, states, and countries as one coherent machine.

Even someone like Taylor Swift depends on the state to turn talent into wealth at scale. Touring requires airports, highways, police, venues, contracts, insurance, payment systems, copyright law, and a country stable enough for millions of people to buy tickets instead of worrying about invasion or collapse. Her talent matters, sure, but so does the system that lets that talent become a billion-dollar enterprise.

That is the point. It does not matter how talented Taylor Swift is, how efficient Amazon is, or how many businesses Elon Musk owns. None of them could generate or keep that much wealth without the state.

The more you have, the more government services are working on your behalf. A poor person might receive $500 in food assistance. A rich person gets to keep $100 million because the state makes ownership real. If that wealth would not exist without public protection, then asking some of it to flow back into the public system is not theft.