An excellent, timely piece by Daniel Hannan, writing for the Telegraph: Five reasons not to introduce wealth taxes (I like # 3).
3. Wealth taxes make us all poorer. Ronald Reagan, with his gift for drawing profound lessons from seemingly banal statements, pointed out that when governments subsidise things, they get generally more of them, and when they tax them, they generally get less. Politicians are happy to accept this logic when it comes to taxing, say, carbon emissions, but not when it comes to taxing enterprise. Just as taxes on smoking reduce smoking, so taxes on wealth reduce, you know, wealth. To extend the Gipper’s logic, if you tax rich people in order to subsidise poor people, you end up with fewer rich people and more poor people.
