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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

Taxing wealth acts as an incentive to spread the shares around the company instead of hoarding them. Don't want your wealth taxed? Let the workers enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The same goes for ~90% brackets. Don't want your salary to be taxed at such a high rate? Put that money into R&D or worker's paychecks.

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This only applies in the very limited scenario where you personally own the shares. What's to stop someone from setting up a trust, shell company or similar and then giving them all of the "wealth" while maintaining a controlling interest? From there, the individual simply extracts what they need when they need to. We're basically back to the original scenario only with more steps added in between.

I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."

> I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."

Mm, I dunno. Why not? Maybe Apple shouldn't be sitting on a massive pile of cash which could be put to some useful purpose.

Because business continuity is an important aspect of running a business. Who's to say what is hording and what is simply risk management?

A company owns a nuclear plant. Are they hording wealth?

"Facebook the company" owns "Facebook the website". Are they hording wealth?

Alphabet own the Google trade mark. Are they hording wealth?

My and my colleagues decided to make a joke cryptocurrency that nobody is using.

Elon Musk want to buy our company for 10 billion $, but we don't want to sell. Are we hoarding wealth?

Is it possible to either tax the individual for owning a controlling interest, or tax the trust directly as an individual?

Perhaps a law that no entity can own more than X% of a company, and outlaw hedge funds? Thinking out loud here. I wouldn't snap my finger to make it happen, but I think it's fair for the layman to questions the status quo "why do organizations exist that allow small groups of people to play the game of timing arbitrage on the market to amass billions of dollars".

The (capitalist) counter argument is that forcing people to spread wealth acts as an incentive not to innovate

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