Comment by IanCal

> We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed.

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?