---
title: "On a wealth tax"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/on-a-wealth-tax
published: 2012-05-05
summary: "In a country where the budget gets sawed up, a tax on the rich moves money from one set of oligarchs to another, and punishes only the honest."
---

# On a wealth tax

In our conditions, a wealth tax would benefit practically no one.

The poor dream of "payback" and "fair distribution". Before elections, politicians toss them the bait of a tax on the rich.

But what can a tax like that achieve in a country where the budget is sawed up, as we call embezzlement here, in every way imaginable? A plain redistribution of money from one set of oligarchs, who have already "stolen their fill", to those who now control the budget's spending lines: at best to other oligarchs, at worst to the same ones.

And the point? Social justice? Only its ghost, which the poor electorate glimpses in the heat of its heavy worries "about life".

Now let's assume for a second something unlikely but still possible. Suppose we have honest rich people. They'll have to pay the tax, and since they're honest, they won't get it back (through the sawing that follows). So the "wealth tax" should be renamed the "tax on honestly earned wealth".

There. That's exactly what the system is after: to make people not "live by the law" but "play by their rules". And if you want to be honest, you've got no business here. Painfully clever, are you? Painfully.

And the tax itself, even if it worked as intended, is, like a progressive income tax, society's admission either that you can't earn money honestly in this country, so "ya gotta share", or that this society doesn't need rich and enterprising people.