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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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Imagine if I had a collectible Lex Luthor action figure which you really wanted - you would be willing to pay me $100 for it. Then you stopped thinking that superhero stuff was cool and didn't want the action figure anymore for more than $10. What has changed about the world is that I no longer have the option to get the $90 difference from you by selling the action figure, but only because you would keep the $90. No money went anywhere. However, market value was reduced. If my action figure and your money were all that existed in the world, then the world would no longer be a place with $200 of value. It would now only have $110 of value, and in that sense it would be a worse place to the extent that market value corresponds to happiness or abstract utility.
Wealth is not a conserved quantity. You can reduce my wealth just by wanting what I have less, even if afterwards we both have exactly what we had before.
That explanation right there is why a "wealth tax" is much more difficult to implement in any meaningful way that proponents of it like to admit
But billionaires still want to live fancy lifestyles. Tax the methods they use to create cash flow, ban a lot of the tricks they use to manipulate stock valuation (the Tesla valuation is fake, etc), and a lot of that problem goes away. Like taxing the use of collateral in loans (easily treated as advance in capital gains tax on the asset you took a collateral on).
Taxing the use of collateral in loans would hit anyone with a HELOC. Like I said, it's more complicated than proponents like to admit.
As I've mentioned elsewhere that I talked about this, allowing for exceptions specific to improving the asset (home renovations, etc) and certain similar "pro-social" uses would be possible. Would require some basic audit to show what the money is used for (and set caps so you don't get billionaires "renovating yachts" via a friend's company)