My pet solution to wealth inequality is to distribute the wealth by printing shares in public and large private corporations and handing them out to the general population when the individual is born, but full control handed over gradually, from year 18-30.
Of course combined with a general education in economics.
I always thought it highly unfair and detrimental to society that some start from zero while a small number of people are handed everything to them.
Please explain to me why my idea is foolish. Because I believe it will make society flourish.
I don't know anything about him personally, but if he's that rich then I'm certain he has a highly paid team of extremely expert and well-informed people that are giving him his information. I take what he has to say with a grain of salt since he has such a massive self-interest in this, but still worthy of examining his arguments
Depends on what kind of ultra wealthy. If they are selling wealth tied to the locale, like property, that they were charging rent for before, that seems fine, maybe even beneficial for current renters.
If they are moving businesses away then that could cause the job loss and other bad effects.
The ultrawealthy have been exiting SF, LA, NYC, and Chicago for decades now. Not sure how many are left in those cities since every election cycle brings doom and gloom that the wealthy will abandon those states for sure, this time.
Most recently during COVID, when many a VC exited SF and NYC to Florida with loud caterwauling about how the cities were completely over and Miami is where it's all going to be at going forward.
Nearly every single one has quietly crawled their way back into those respective cities. Agglomeration effects baby!
Listen, I am sure there is some level of taxation at which the rich will in fact decamp and go somewhere else, but empirically we are nowhere near it, nor does it appear that any of the mainstream proposals (either for increased high-bracket tax rates or wealth taxes) get anywhere near it.
For example, MA instituted a 4% surtax on all incomes over $1M and... and the population of payers actually increased 25% since instituting it[1].
What does it even mean that an ultrawealthy person would "leave" a city? One not unreasonable interpretation is that they would no longer have standing to promote their own interests there at the expense of the rest of the population. As a non-billionaire myself this sounds like a pretty good idea to me; what's good for billionaires is often not so good for everybody else.
That's an interesting point. America is a good example of an economy where the majority of businesses are designed to channel the majority of their revenues to the ultra wealthy. I could see an exodus of ultra wealthy people where it opens up greater economic opportunity for regular people and small businesses.
> America is a good example of an economy where the majority of businesses are designed to channel the majority of their revenues to the ultra wealthy.
A boy is born into the Colonel Sanderson's plantation. Young eyes see thousands in stooped labor on vast fields disappearing to the horizon.
If you are trying to squeeze them for extra tax revenue then yes. The ultra rich have numerous ways to fight back. Which usually leads to such ineffective tax measures landing on the middle class (case in point, Netherlands).
Wealth tax is universally a terrible idea, it has never worked to its original intended purpose. It does play well politically though, especially to the proles.
Their company already don't produce much in France, it's all imported. It's paying minimal taxes already on what it produces and sell outside of France. And they don't pay taxes personally. So what would they lose if they leave?
For the things that are actually made in France, it's because they have to. They would have moved it already otherwise. So it's physical assets and people that can't be moved or sourced elsewhere. So what they have to produce there, they will still do. Their real estate, their logistic chain vehicles, and their local workshops will stay here. Even if they would sell part of it in fact, the actual physical stuff would stay here.
And what they sell here they will still do: they are not going to exit the French market just because they can't be physically here so it's not going to affect the economy that much. What, less jet and luxury hotels revenue? It's ok.
And of course, we can increase taxes on their companies so that they get less revenue to compensate their exile. We tax trading or exporting French based company stocks so that they can't move that around without paying first.
Besides, once a stock is bought from the IPO, moving it from hand to hand is not investing more money into the company in any way. It's not going back into the economy.
They can move with their bank accounts and bonds, why do we care? It's not something that goes into our economy. They made sure of it.
No it's not. It's not binary. Just like GP said. Wealthy people moving their assets to new locales is at least difficult if not impossible in some cases (like real estate).
Even if wealthy people didn't move or otherwise evade or avoid the wealth tax and fully complied with the spirit of the thing, I don't see how it could work over time. If the tax "worked" and reduced their wealth, then the revenue from the tax would drop. There would be a natural tendency for the system to then start moving the threshold down to keep the revenue up. Where does that end, with everybody being equally poor?
There is a disconnect between those two ideas. The tax doesn't need to reduce their wealth. Wealthy people generally continue to make money, usually without even having to try or work.
> In this case, "bad things happening" is an exodus of the ultra wealthy, which is not so simple to reverse.
Speaking as an American who lives in California (so not directly relevant to the article in question, but 'wealth exodus' is often brought up to scare people about wealth taxes here as well):
Fucking Good. Bye Felicia. Hope they all move to Florida and/or Texas. We'll still be absolute fine here without them.
But also institute land value taxes so they can't be here while pretending to not be here
I also live in California, and agree with you in sentiment because the housing prices are too damn high.
However, the reason that most municipalities around here will bend over backwards to attract wealthy residents/businesses is because of their chronically underfunded liabilities (pensions, retirement healthcare benefits, etc).
After spending months searching for a french citizen who could comment on this issue without any conflict of interest, we have finally located this man.
Don’t billionaires normally buy newspapers, media and even politicians and let their voice be heard that way? By contrast this is refreshing, vulnerable and…kind of cute.
It seems clear to me that something needs to be done if we want to avoid growing wealth/income inequality pretty much globally.
Wealth tax is just one approach, but even top income tax rates used to be much higher in the US, and you could argue that politicians since LBJ and Reagan have failed the median citizen completely in that regard (nice visualization: https://mystack.wyman.us/p/tax-brackets-and-rates-1913-2024).
Income taxes are heavily dependent on what’s classified as income. In the US we explicitly have a carve out for long term investment returns into a separation category making simple arguments around the top tax bracket irrelevant.
Add some other deductions to what counts as income and sudden the rates becomes all but a joke.
I do agree that sidestepping income taxes is too easy in the first place, but that is on legislators, too (and lowering those top tax brackets is just unhelpful in any case).
I find the notion that you should pay less tax on capital gains asinine, too; it makes no sense to me that people should have to pay less tax on income that they didn't even work for.
My belief is that people were blind to growing income inequality and flawed taxation schemes because there was enough growth to paper over the resulting issues, but this stops being the case.
Specifically housing, I'd argue, has not become so expensive because of greedy construction workers (or immigrants, or regulation) but because average homeowners have to compete against an increasingly wealthy upper-class that sees real estate as a pure investment/rent extraction mechanism.
As a former resident of France, here are the headlines I observed through the years:
The wealthy abandoned France in 2000 and moved to Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2009 and moved to... Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2014 and moved to... Russia.
They abandoned France in 2020 and moved to... USA.
For nearly 2 decades there has been this steady rollout of the news saying the wealthy will abandon there socialist-democratic country for somewhere else. But most of them tend to stick around. A few abandon their dumb project and find their way back even.
Literally this. Studies repeatedly show this is an empty threat by the rich, because their wealth is intrinsically tied to the economy of their country of residence in most cases and therefore readily taxable while being difficult to move. This is why they bluster that they’ll leave: because they know they cannot, without forfeiting far more than they’d lose via higher taxation.
To be fair, France implemented a wealth tax in 1989 and it ended up costing them more in lost tax revenue than they raised. This is the story of most countries that implement a wealth tax (such as Netherlands, Sweden, etc), and is why they end up removing them. Not only do many consider them immoral, they tend to cost the government tax revenue and simply don't work.
Italy implemented a wealth tax on investments (savings account, stocks, bonds) more than years ago, and it doesn't seem to have caused any loss in revenue.
They tend to be removed because the richer people convince the poor they need to be removed.
The usual argument at the bottom of the article "the wealthy will leave" only applies if you let them take their money with them. If you can sanction Russian oligarchs, you can sanction French people who got rich in France and then flee or move their money elsewhere.
And that does not even include the number of rich families who own vast amounts of real estate which they cannot take with them. If the argument is "they'll increase the rent" then implement rent caps (and crack down on fake renters who run AirBnB ops or sublet).
My pet solution to wealth inequality is to distribute the wealth by printing shares in public and large private corporations and handing them out to the general population when the individual is born, but full control handed over gradually, from year 18-30.
Of course combined with a general education in economics.
I always thought it highly unfair and detrimental to society that some start from zero while a small number of people are handed everything to them.
Please explain to me why my idea is foolish. Because I believe it will make society flourish.
> LVMH owner Bernard Arnault, who could take €1bn hit, says proposed 2% levy ‘aims to destroy liberal economy’
I don't know why what Bernard Arnault says is on HN, he has no competencies in economy.
No dumb rich-hate here, simply that Bernard Arnault is definitely not best person to talk about the subject.
I don't know anything about him personally, but if he's that rich then I'm certain he has a highly paid team of extremely expert and well-informed people that are giving him his information. I take what he has to say with a grain of salt since he has such a massive self-interest in this, but still worthy of examining his arguments
Doesn't have to be binary.
Just make it like a volume knob. Turn it up, slowly, see what happens. If bad things happen, turn it back down.
Make a list of countries that created temporary taxes and that later removed them.
Meditate on how good your openness to that idea was.
Creating and removing sounds very binary to me.
In this case, "bad things happening" is an exodus of the ultra wealthy, which is not so simple to reverse.
If your economy is based on producing things of real value rather than management of wealth, this is a good thing.
Depends on what kind of ultra wealthy. If they are selling wealth tied to the locale, like property, that they were charging rent for before, that seems fine, maybe even beneficial for current renters.
If they are moving businesses away then that could cause the job loss and other bad effects.
So maybe tax the first kind of wealth more?
The ultrawealthy have been exiting SF, LA, NYC, and Chicago for decades now. Not sure how many are left in those cities since every election cycle brings doom and gloom that the wealthy will abandon those states for sure, this time.
Most recently during COVID, when many a VC exited SF and NYC to Florida with loud caterwauling about how the cities were completely over and Miami is where it's all going to be at going forward.
Nearly every single one has quietly crawled their way back into those respective cities. Agglomeration effects baby!
Listen, I am sure there is some level of taxation at which the rich will in fact decamp and go somewhere else, but empirically we are nowhere near it, nor does it appear that any of the mainstream proposals (either for increased high-bracket tax rates or wealth taxes) get anywhere near it.
For example, MA instituted a 4% surtax on all incomes over $1M and... and the population of payers actually increased 25% since instituting it[1].
[1] https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/28/massachusetts-millionai...
What does it even mean that an ultrawealthy person would "leave" a city? One not unreasonable interpretation is that they would no longer have standing to promote their own interests there at the expense of the rest of the population. As a non-billionaire myself this sounds like a pretty good idea to me; what's good for billionaires is often not so good for everybody else.
I suppose they could take their enterprises with them. Removing jobs and taxes from the local economy.
Is that a bad thing?
That's an interesting point. America is a good example of an economy where the majority of businesses are designed to channel the majority of their revenues to the ultra wealthy. I could see an exodus of ultra wealthy people where it opens up greater economic opportunity for regular people and small businesses.
> America is a good example of an economy where the majority of businesses are designed to channel the majority of their revenues to the ultra wealthy.
A boy is born into the Colonel Sanderson's plantation. Young eyes see thousands in stooped labor on vast fields disappearing to the horizon.
Do you believe the economy is a zero sum game?
If real wages stagnate while the ultrawealthy amass wealth at a superlinear rate, I think you could argue it is.
No but if there are no billionaires to buy up our media and politicians maybe we can start making positive changes in this country.
If you are trying to squeeze them for extra tax revenue then yes. The ultra rich have numerous ways to fight back. Which usually leads to such ineffective tax measures landing on the middle class (case in point, Netherlands).
Wealth tax is universally a terrible idea, it has never worked to its original intended purpose. It does play well politically though, especially to the proles.
How you say that would that impact the IQ of the population? Will go up or down?
And note that being an IQ denier would transform your question in an insult to intelligence.
Would a very-small number of people leaving affect a well-distributed and population-wide metric like IQ in a measurable way at all? I'd expect not.
What are you trying to get at? Could you be more direct? I'm having trouble making sense of this post.
I suspect that being born into money is a much stronger predictor of becoming ultra-wealthy than IQ.
I doubt it would have a measurable impact on the IQ of the population.
It would probably go up, seeing how excess wealth is associated with psychological illness.
But Social Darwinism is an ugly way to see the world.
What if they leave?
Their company already don't produce much in France, it's all imported. It's paying minimal taxes already on what it produces and sell outside of France. And they don't pay taxes personally. So what would they lose if they leave?
For the things that are actually made in France, it's because they have to. They would have moved it already otherwise. So it's physical assets and people that can't be moved or sourced elsewhere. So what they have to produce there, they will still do. Their real estate, their logistic chain vehicles, and their local workshops will stay here. Even if they would sell part of it in fact, the actual physical stuff would stay here.
And what they sell here they will still do: they are not going to exit the French market just because they can't be physically here so it's not going to affect the economy that much. What, less jet and luxury hotels revenue? It's ok.
And of course, we can increase taxes on their companies so that they get less revenue to compensate their exile. We tax trading or exporting French based company stocks so that they can't move that around without paying first.
Besides, once a stock is bought from the IPO, moving it from hand to hand is not investing more money into the company in any way. It's not going back into the economy.
They can move with their bank accounts and bonds, why do we care? It's not something that goes into our economy. They made sure of it.
Why would one want to reverse it? Let them all go cause problems in Dubai instead.
No it's not. It's not binary. Just like GP said. Wealthy people moving their assets to new locales is at least difficult if not impossible in some cases (like real estate).
Even if wealthy people didn't move or otherwise evade or avoid the wealth tax and fully complied with the spirit of the thing, I don't see how it could work over time. If the tax "worked" and reduced their wealth, then the revenue from the tax would drop. There would be a natural tendency for the system to then start moving the threshold down to keep the revenue up. Where does that end, with everybody being equally poor?
> If the tax "worked" and reduced their wealth
There is a disconnect between those two ideas. The tax doesn't need to reduce their wealth. Wealthy people generally continue to make money, usually without even having to try or work.
This is only "bad" if one believes in bullshit in the line of "trickle down economics".
> In this case, "bad things happening" is an exodus of the ultra wealthy, which is not so simple to reverse.
Speaking as an American who lives in California (so not directly relevant to the article in question, but 'wealth exodus' is often brought up to scare people about wealth taxes here as well):
Fucking Good. Bye Felicia. Hope they all move to Florida and/or Texas. We'll still be absolute fine here without them.
But also institute land value taxes so they can't be here while pretending to not be here
I also live in California, and agree with you in sentiment because the housing prices are too damn high.
However, the reason that most municipalities around here will bend over backwards to attract wealthy residents/businesses is because of their chronically underfunded liabilities (pensions, retirement healthcare benefits, etc).
After spending months searching for a french citizen who could comment on this issue without any conflict of interest, we have finally located this man.
…you’re talking about The Guardian? This is rage bait.
Don’t billionaires normally buy newspapers, media and even politicians and let their voice be heard that way? By contrast this is refreshing, vulnerable and…kind of cute.
Oh that all billionaires were this undevious.
Regardless of how you feel about taxation, increasing taxes will not fix out of control spending.
Regardless of how you feel about spending, decreasing spending will not fix out of control inequality.
The perfect functional synonym of tax is: Friction.
Its understanding having proportion in mind is: How strongly you're breaking the economy.
> perfect functional synonym of tax is: Friction
In the same way fundraising for a start-up is friction. Nations are exercises in economies of scale.
If that's a pure and whole definition, then having no taxes at all would surely result in the best economy possible, yes?
"Friction pays for infrastructure"?
It's clearly not a synonym.
What we really need is strong worker protections and monopoly busting. A wealth tax is treating the symptom, not the cause.
Thanksgiving would be deadly, says turkey
..nd there it is, turkey-brain. Just like that, back to knee-jerk binary [0,1].
It seems clear to me that something needs to be done if we want to avoid growing wealth/income inequality pretty much globally.
Wealth tax is just one approach, but even top income tax rates used to be much higher in the US, and you could argue that politicians since LBJ and Reagan have failed the median citizen completely in that regard (nice visualization: https://mystack.wyman.us/p/tax-brackets-and-rates-1913-2024).
Wealth tax seems a step in the right direction.
Income taxes are heavily dependent on what’s classified as income. In the US we explicitly have a carve out for long term investment returns into a separation category making simple arguments around the top tax bracket irrelevant.
Add some other deductions to what counts as income and sudden the rates becomes all but a joke.
I do agree that sidestepping income taxes is too easy in the first place, but that is on legislators, too (and lowering those top tax brackets is just unhelpful in any case).
I find the notion that you should pay less tax on capital gains asinine, too; it makes no sense to me that people should have to pay less tax on income that they didn't even work for.
My belief is that people were blind to growing income inequality and flawed taxation schemes because there was enough growth to paper over the resulting issues, but this stops being the case.
Specifically housing, I'd argue, has not become so expensive because of greedy construction workers (or immigrants, or regulation) but because average homeowners have to compete against an increasingly wealthy upper-class that sees real estate as a pure investment/rent extraction mechanism.
Capital gains taxes are much easier to administer, as are inheritance taxes, and land value taxes.
>It seems clear to me that something needs to be done if we want to avoid growing wealth/income inequality pretty much globally.
World War II was pretty effective at redistributing income (among those that survived). Lets hope it doesn't take World War III.
As a former resident of France, here are the headlines I observed through the years:
The wealthy abandoned France in 2000 and moved to Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2009 and moved to... Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2014 and moved to... Russia.
They abandoned France in 2020 and moved to... USA.
For nearly 2 decades there has been this steady rollout of the news saying the wealthy will abandon there socialist-democratic country for somewhere else. But most of them tend to stick around. A few abandon their dumb project and find their way back even.
Literally this. Studies repeatedly show this is an empty threat by the rich, because their wealth is intrinsically tied to the economy of their country of residence in most cases and therefore readily taxable while being difficult to move. This is why they bluster that they’ll leave: because they know they cannot, without forfeiting far more than they’d lose via higher taxation.
It’s empty bluster.
Millionaire flight is mostly myth:
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/does-taxing-the-rich-cause-mil...
And, like 'trickle-down economics', a very convenient myth for the rich.
Switzerland does have a wealth tax[0].
The latest destination for some rich foreigners is Italy due to the lump sum tax on foreign income (200k) for the first 10 years of moving there.
But Italy also has a 2‰ wealth tax since 2013 or so.
All these news are always exagerated.
[0] https://thepoorswiss.com/wealth-tax/
*World's richest man
Bernard Arnault is no longer world's richest man as of 2025, according to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...
Putting away the cheese would be deadly for the economy, say local mice.
I will take motivated reasoning for 300 Alex.
To be fair, France implemented a wealth tax in 1989 and it ended up costing them more in lost tax revenue than they raised. This is the story of most countries that implement a wealth tax (such as Netherlands, Sweden, etc), and is why they end up removing them. Not only do many consider them immoral, they tend to cost the government tax revenue and simply don't work.
Italy implemented a wealth tax on investments (savings account, stocks, bonds) more than years ago, and it doesn't seem to have caused any loss in revenue.
They tend to be removed because the richer people convince the poor they need to be removed.
>they tend to cost the government tax revenue
Is that actually true though? Or just something a mouthpiece of the wealthy has put out in some shonky report?
The Netherlands still has a wealth tax.
"The economy" is a relative term that might as well be substituted for "my personal interests" in 99% of cases.
Few people care about "the economy" writ large, they just care about their little corner of it. This applies to both rich and poor.
The usual argument at the bottom of the article "the wealthy will leave" only applies if you let them take their money with them. If you can sanction Russian oligarchs, you can sanction French people who got rich in France and then flee or move their money elsewhere.
And that does not even include the number of rich families who own vast amounts of real estate which they cannot take with them. If the argument is "they'll increase the rent" then implement rent caps (and crack down on fake renters who run AirBnB ops or sublet).
> let them take their money with them
The image of taxman as thief has never been clearer.