I think there is kind of a breakdown in social order here. If society allows you to become the chief, it ought to also impose upon you a burden, an obligation, to wield your power over the tribe fairly, generously. To care for the weak, to make sure that everyone benefits, to ensure that things stay stable and safe under your leadership... The standard is higher, not lower. The sacrifice is greater, not lesser.

It is absolutely bizarre and you can see exactly thew way PG, and other like him, are thinking. They all want to have this immense power (and it truly is immense, more immense than ever in modern history!) but they want none of the obligation, none of the responsibility.

Even asking for 20 percent is too much, apparently.

It's really sick.

For most people their ability to earn is by far their largest asset. You can kind of get a feel for how difficult it is to bootstrap into generational wealth if you think about the math -- it takes time to replace that earnings portion of your own balance sheet, and even more to well replace it; a lot has to go right in the interim.

Investments shift to things whose tax value updates slowly, for example property which typically adjusted more slowly than other financial assets. This tends to rise property prices and concentrate ownership.

It causes other distortions in allocation depending on the tax details, but wealthy people tend to adjust more aggressively to changing conditions.

If you accumulated a fortune, there was some skill at play. There was also considerable luck and some exploitation. The wealth tax is a way of paying back for the luck and exploitation.

You will still be extremely wealthy.

Paul wants to play the fairness card. Life is not fair and those who accumulated massive fortunes won the lottery. Don’t let the massively rich conflate issues. Don’t get fooled.

This is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's not adding 20% to an already taxed entity, it's adding taxes where there weren't before. Adding 20% on top of the income tax would indeed be controversial. In his framing the rate of return is effectively untaxed income, so it would be more accurate to say that this is like adding income tax to a currently untaxed income stream.

This does make retiring a tad bit complicated. Say you've saved $3M and are ready to retire. That means each year you're spending $75K just to satisfy this tax.

[1] Depending on how your wealth is structured. Cash is 2.5%, but if you own, say, a business, you pay the tax on the value of the goods, not on the value of the building, hardware, etc. You don't pay Zakat on the house you live on. Agriculture is actually taxed at 10%, etc.

P.S. a wealth tax is a property tax. They have existed in the US since before the income tax (which was originally considered unconstitutional by its opponents).