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Comment by u_sama | Hacker News Reader

Counter-example: All the European, and world countries who have implemented the various inheritance, wealth taxes and heavy redistribution yet the inequality is still widening. Take France, Norway or Sweden as the ideal social democracies.

Argentina (the end game of social democracy) pre-Milei had a huge array of taxes and regulations which lead to the state misusing that money to actually enrich a small elite of politically aligned. Similar things and arrangements (under the form of subsidies to companies) will happen under Trump and levying more taxes will just give more opportunity for corruption.

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Sweden has no inheritance or wealth tax.

Specifically because those don't work at all. Not because some evil rich people decided to scrap them.

There was one until 2007, many countries had wealth taxes. Also in 2005 inheritance tax was repealed.

In France wealth tax was repealed in 2017 I think but will be soon reintroduced under a new form.

Unlike people, capital has no nation. It can just move effortlessly from France to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. That's why single-country initiatives to e.g. tax wealth (or even tax extremely profitable companies) are doomed to failure: those assets are easy to transfer and hide; if the UK passes a progressive wealth tax, all those global billionaires will just sell their empty houses in London and buy empty houses somewhere else.

Hence the proposal by many economists that the only solution is a broad agreement on a global progressive wealth tax, with at least the major blocs of the US and EU on board. See e.g. "A Brief History of Inequality".

This is basically a prisoner dilemma on a global scale where the incentives are for single marginalised nations to leverage the fact of being tax havens to survive globalisation. The dream of a single global tax is as possible as making China/US respect any of the agreements they have signed regarding trade and environment.

The same proposal is also criticized by many economists too, who argue that inequality has not risen as sharply as Piketty's crew claims, or that the bulk of that inequality is linked to the real estate, for which the only solution is build more houses and destroy the capital accumulation of older generation to the profit on newer ones.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...

Re real estate: indeed an LVT would go a long way to ameliorate the unsustainable situation regarding housing across Europe. It's a simple and efficient solution, and can be applied at the country level.

But I would argue that the situation in housing is actually a consequence, and not a separate phenomenon, of the broader issue of inequality-driven asset price inflation.

Fuly agree, LVT seems to be a good incentive. As well as de-regulating, easing or digitilazing all the bureaucratic processus related to building so that the time between wanting to build and actually built nears 0. Also introduce anti-democratic laws that push the will of the group over the individual house owners who are motivated to block new contructions to see their number go up.

Selling empty homes in London will increase supply of housing in London and lowering the price of housing, allowing less than wealthy people to accumulate wealth.

The problem with countries like UK is that real estate is the only way of obtaining, growing and keeping wealth there. And I mean the only.

Does all of this capital really do anything for a country if it's just being parked? Would we miss it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax

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