Memes

There are some good arguments for a wealth tax (without distinguishing land from other assets, which would be easily avoided via financial arrangements):

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9l7AYl0jUE (and see his other videos)
• Gary Stevenson’s website: https://www.wealtheconomics.org
• UK Patriotic Millionares, which Gary Stevenson is part of: https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/the-problem
• Similar org, in the US: https://patrioticmillionaires.org

This is a promising idea. Ultimately, it won’t work.

Landowners raise rents and business owners keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. Land-holding capital is only one piece of the puzzle. As promised, I wrote something longer about this topic, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1052415

One solution is to tax imperialists, rather than the ‘landowners’ and ‘speculators’, but they won’t allow it unless the alternative is revolution. This is how the US got its New Deal. The organised unions, socialists, and communists and offered an ultimatum: New Deal or what the Russian’s had.

The US bourgeoisie bent over backwards, increasing taxes to almost 100% above a threshold to stave off a domestic revolution. (In foreign states, they backed paramilitaries, etc, to stave off revolution). Then they spent the best part of a century rolling back those taxes and the welfare services they were spent on.

You can read about this in:

• Hayek, for a right-wing liberal perspective, called ‘conservative’ in the US today,
• Piketty, for a left-wing liberal perspective, called ‘liberal’ in the US today, or
• Richard D Wolff, for a Marxist perspective, called any number of foul names in the US today – see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlhFMa4t28A&t=3901s from ~33:00.

The lesson is, you can argue for higher taxes on the bourgeoisie if you like, you may even get them to agree, but they will connive until you are complacent and then betray you.