This is an absolutely wild comparison. The choice is not "everything is purely market forces" vs "everything is centrally planned". We have all kinds of implementations across the world that have different systems.

> The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively

They have different targets though surely? The effective part here is that for one group it's getting more into the hands of the less well off, or funding (say) schools, healthcare, etc. The effective part for someone else is making a single person or family richer.

> So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?

Because utility is not linear. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the very extreme ends of a scale are not likely the most beneficial under almost any measure. If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?

It is not surprising to me that it's a good idea overall to let people benefit from figuring out how to do things that people want.

It is also not surprising to me that it can be a good idea to take some of that benefit, and use it to do some of the following

* Alleviate suffering * Long term planning/research to benefit all and speed up progress * Core infrastructure that everybody benefits from but is hard to structure with pure market forces

For example, companies benefit from an educated workforce - are they individually going to fund schooling for young kids?

The goal is to try and hit some of those other things while not discouraging people too much from doing the things we want.

> taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made.

Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?

Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me alongside graphs showing the extent to which our inequality is growing. https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ see the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" graph in particular.

This is more a disagreement of values than facts, I think. Some people see the richest man's net worth go from $100B to >$1T and think he deserves that for starting these companies, and taking any of it from him is class warfare. Others think that rich people's pissing contests and lifestyles would be essentially the same if their wealth capped out at say $100B instead, we're morally obligated to use that money to try to meet Americans' basic needs, and using other's taxpayer dollars to allow him to reach those heights (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that>) is class warfare.

High marginal income taxes (it was 91% in 1963, 70% until 1981, there's your compelling case where they turned out to be right, inequality was not growing then like it is now) or a wealth tax are not the same as Soviet style socialism. They still give an incentive for entrepreneurs, innovators, and hard workers.

all the negative effects on economic output come from the fact that there is always some minimum amount of capital you need to start a successful business in each industry, and if nobody has enough wealth to match that requirement the business has no way to take off. but that argument only works if crowd funding or state investment are not practical, which is mostly true in our economic system but its not a law of nature.

we dont have to go all in on soviet style five year plans. in fact we know its one of the worst possible systems because the real world is unpredictable and large scale inflexible plans usually fail. its not always a disaster but its always unstable. but neoliberal capitalism is not the only form of a non-command economy.

"there is no alternative" only makes sense if you ignore all the things in between and outside to create a false binary. there is also tito style market socialism, decentralized commune systems, continuous planning, hybrid systems like china and vietnam, capitalism with worker ownership, and a lot of others i dont even know. not all of them are practical (like anarchy) but the ideas already exist and i think its worth it to try and make them real. a better world is possible as long as ours is not perfect.

Property tax breaks in my locale lead to empty lots and empty buildings, which is the least efficient use of land imaginable. Property value seems to play a significant enough role in convincing land owners to sell their underutilized land if property taxes provide the activation energy to force them to sell. Otherwise they sit and speculate. So, your argument is convincing in theory, but appears to fall apart in practice. Aside, I’m a fan of Georgism in theory.

> Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.

I’m sure wealth managers are already devising strategies for reducing taxable wealth based on speculative laws and regulations. This shouldn’t be a reason not to proceed, but instead to put more resources to effective design.

The best part is this works for private companies too. If you work at a startup and get options, now you don't have to pay taxes (as cash) for options you exercise which later turn out to be worthless. You can just hand the government some of your shares. Later down the line, the government either shares in your windfall or misses out along with you. Very fair.