Having a court ordered judgement entered against you is cause and is a result of due process. It's an entirely different scenario.
We see this all the time already. For example, Medicaid won't pay for your extremely expensive end of life care if you have assets. So, people give away their assets (to a trust, to family) before applying for Medicaid to cover their nursing home. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. People will adjust where they can to avoid tax.
This also already happens with income tax. For example, executive compensation is primarily provided as capital gains rather than income because it's much more tax efficient. Everything is in the open.
The other issue here is one of cost. The IRS has to fund the cost of analyzing filings and deciding to audit. This is very different from a post-judgement scenario.
It's a very different thing.
1. A surprising departure from the rules and norms - I assume probably illegal.
2. Part of a campaign designed to ruin Russia.
You might have misunderstood the argument the anti-taxers (pro-property?) people are bringing up. There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all. The fact that wealth confiscation is being deployed against Russians is no surprise from that perspective and not undermining the core argument.
However, if it makes you feel better, I do agree that given that the War on Terror was pointed inwards fairly quickly I expect the techniques used in the War on Russia's Economy will also move to US home soil in the next decade and there may well be large scale wealth confiscation in the US.
But this does not apply to us when we seize Russian assets? By your very logic if seizing wealth is so problematic, well we just seized a whole lot of wealth. I don't think this example actually works here.
It would be bad if we did this to ourselves. We do it to our enemies to hurt them.
But, I suspect the other guy was referring to trusting in economic stability. I don't think there's any reason why sanctions against bad actors like Russia might undermine trust in American investments.
If you want to make the argument that it is literal and raw might-makes-right on the high seas, ok. But that type of barbarian world is not one I encourage and it'd be a bit stunning to find someone who wants the world to work that way.
The US wouldn't do well in a world like that either, US citizens have more assets to seize than foreigners do.
As if that's not evidence of far more barbaric mechanisms at play in geopolitics...
There is a pretty good chance this is just making people feel bad and making it harder to normalise the situation. This is action is literally not helping, and is a breach of good norms against stealing. It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.
Any Russian billionaires that don't realize that this is more of Putin's incompetence than western antagonism deserve a random punitive gesture.
In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
Maybe I've missed out on some life experiences, but I've never seen petty theft help defuse a tense situation. It is not going to be beneficial to achieving a sane outcome.
> In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
This is wishful thinking. All of the thievery was done by NATO - there is a very high chance that they will identify NATO as the threat to them.
And if they do blame Putin (which I think is unlikely, groups tend to close ranks when threatened) how is that supposed to help? What are the billionaires supposed to do that the Ukraine military or US State Department can't do? Billionaires aren't that big compared to a government military.
And you're vehemently argue against points that have been known for months, the oligarchs are deeply unhappy with Putin over what has happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/29/russia-oliga...
Putin may have them under his thumb, but that doesn't mean they should be left to their comfort rather than forced to face the direct consequences of Putin's actions.
2. What do you expect to happen here? How do you think these thefts have helped the situation? Even if you want to argue that these people now hate Putin, they are powerless. The west just stripped them of all their assets.
Wealth is actual ownership interest in valuable companies, which can be moved offshore or the person can renounce citizenship and relocate to a country with friendlier tax laws in the extreme case.
A wealth tax would also have the effect that people expecting to generate lots of wealth would just move somewhere else to do so, or not come to the US in the first place.
Whenever I've seen it brought up it's always that it would require a constitutional amendment (specifically in the US). The federal government isn't allowed to do taxes that way under the current system (Article 1 Clause 2 Section 3).
Hell, the feds weren't even allowed to do a straight income tax until the 16th amendment.
Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point. Who knows, perhaps that's astroturfing by troll teams employed by billionaires to try and discourage the masses. As you said, they've already got plenty of lawyers to work on it from the constitutional end - including 6 of the lawyers on the Supreme Court.
Huh. Weird. Well, I don't see it brought up on HN all that often (once a month tops?), so we must hang out in different circles outside of here.
Anyways, you have a good one.