Comment by rekabis

America in the 1950s had a 90% tax on the top tier. No-one of consequence fled the country.

No matter how you tax, the asset-owning class is almost guaranteed to remain in place, because the vast majority of their assets are physical, and cannot be easily moved except at much greater expense than any tax.

I mean, if offshoring took 75 years to achieve, what makes you think that any member of the Parasite Class will be able to pack up and leave within a decade, much less a half decade?

It costs ridiculously insane amounts of money to move a business down the street, and you’re keeping the same employees, and not re-training an entirely new batch of replacements in the new location.

About the only “asset” that can “leave” with anything approaching sub-decade immediacy are the purely digital ones, with a business that is 100% Internet-based and without any physical assets of any kind, where you can spin up a new offshore server and migrate the services to it with just a few mouse clicks.

And those are vanishingly few in number. Most so-called “Internet companies” still have oodles of physical assets, from offices (where return-to-office mandates force employees back into) to land to physical servers sitting in data centres.

And in the end, we have the most telling question: what is the difference with the wealthy leaving due to a tax, and failing to implement that tax in the first place?

NOTHING.

There are no downsides, only upsides. Either they leave and open up room for another entrepreneur to thrive in that spot, or they stay and pay the tax.

Either way, nothing of value is lost by wealth taxation.