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Comment by Irishsteve | Hacker News Reader

Then move to France or Scandinavia. I'd suggest Norway since they have a huge oil reserve so the country can sustain its current population.

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But if you build a successful startup, you have to give up your ownership as having wealth/assets gets heavily taxed. If your startup have a bad financial year, its really frustrating to be forced to take a 2% dividend of your networth, tax 40% of that amount as dividend tax and then pay the remaining 1.1% as wealth tax. That is why everyone with some wealth is now moving to Switzerland.

It may be frustrating, but that's the flipside of wealth inequality being much lower in Scandinavia and thereby society being more equal. Which makes it much more pleasant to live in, even for relatively rich people.

(Disclosure: I'm one of those relatively rich people in Scandinavia and I pay lots of taxes but I also enjoy that wealth inequality isn't so extreme over here.)

You're thinking of income inequality.

wealth tax would apply to wealth inequality.

I don't know for Norway, but Denmark is one of the most wealth inequal countries in the world, while also being one of the most income equal.

These two are highly correlated. My background is lower middle class, but high income for a few years made me into high wealth. With lower income tax, that would have been even more extreme. But with the high income tax I'm paying, lots of benefits go to low income families and make it less likely that their kids end up poor when they will be adults.

A proper taxation of inheritance would make income and wealth even stronger correlated, but that's hard to do as long as you can take your extreme wealth abroad. Family dynasties do exist even here and it's still an issue society needs to solve.

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