Wealth vs. Fairness

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Back in December, I started to write this and got cold feet because I wasn’t happy with where the logical conclusion took the article. Now, I realize that with everything that has happened in 2020 since then, bringing this up has the feel of old news. However, with the pandemic response, the protest response, and economic response from the wealthiest few percent of the US, the points I want to make are sharper than ever.

Giving context from the end of 2019, I will go over a few of the arguments against the idea of a wealth tax. Some of the arguments against were straight-up ridiculous, while others were good old strawmen of the sort I have discussed before here, here, and here. One of the favorites was that first wealth is intangible, so specific numbers related to wealth are meaningless. Another is that fairness in any system of laws is a concept that is useless and should have nothing to do with taxes, let alone any other part of the law. The last and most prevalent was that the wealthy pay more than their share of taxes anyway, so they shouldn’t have to pay more. If anything, they should get a tax break.

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Let’s talk about wealth being intangible. The idea of wealth being somehow so elusive as to be undefinable is…