[hkai]

If I didn't know whether I'll be born in the bottom 1% or top 1%, I'd still choose a society that incentivizes wealth creation. Poor people in those societies are the richest poor people in the world. They have more prospects, they have more rights and they have more access to the benefits of civilization like education or electricity than the societies that promote the idea of taking away someone's property and make it difficult to start businesses.

[marcinzm]

>Poor people in those societies are the richest poor people in the world.

I suspect the average poor person in much of Europe is much better off than the average poor person in America. Yet Europe incentives wealth creation a lot less than America.

[ouroboros1]

Wealth taxes are common in Europe. But not in Africa.

[barry-cotter]

There are only four countries with wealth taxes. That is not “common in a Europe”.

> Net wealth taxes are far less widespread than they used to be in the OECD but there has recently been a renewed interest in wealth taxation. While 12 countries had net wealth taxes in 1990, there were only four OECD countries that still levied recurrent taxes on individuals’ net wealth in 2017. Decisions to repeal net wealth taxes have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals. The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low.

http://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/role-and-design-of-net-we...

[gonehome]

Africa is huge so this comment in isolation doesn't really mean anything.

What parts of Africa? Liberal democracy and capitalism are prerequisites before you can make a wealth-tax no wealth-tax comparison.

People in this thread are also confusing protecting the lower bound in society with taxing wealth. This confusion only makes sense when you think wealth creation is zero-sum (it's not). You can protect the lower bound of society (Europe does a better job of this than the US generally) and incentivize growth/wealth creation.

You don't have to choose one, you can choose both.