> If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt.

Please look up "rent", "dividend" and "capital gains".

All three things are taxed, so it doesn't factor into this discussion of tax avoidance.

That's not the point the parent was making.

Rent, dividend and capital gains are all income. I’m not sure what your point is.

> should

OK, but does that include Rowling's Harry Potter sales, or Persson selling Minecraft to Microsoft?

> There's no conceivable reason

How about "someone is offering me a billion to take over the company I founded regardless of if I actually agree to sell"? Or worse, "someone wants to offer me a million for 0.1% of my shares, but if I sold all my shares the market price would crash by 95%, therefore I get all the blame for being rich with only a handful of the benefits"?

I appreciate there are other economic systems besides one-dollar-one-vote, and we may wish to make mega corporations more democratic and less plutocratic-authoritarian, but that kind of change deserves a book rather than a single comment.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this stance but at a practical level it's interesting to think about.

Let's say life is a computer game, and once you max out at $1bn in earned wealth (presumably this includes liquid and illiquid assets such as properties, cars etc), you cannot accumulate more wealth.

How does a government enforce this stance? You cannot stop say Bill Gates shorting Tesla and earning millions from the trade, can you?

Can you stop a landlord renting out their properties to block further income from them?

What about interest generated from bonds or savings accounts?

Do you simply tax the shit out of people if they have over £1bn in wealth?

The big challenge I see for all of this is that rich people have the best (and most expensive) accountants/lawyers money can buy. If you try to tax the shit out of them, their accountants and lawyers will find a way around it.

Also, if one government is too heavy handed, they'll just move assets to another more lenient government.

You make "almost illegal" financial activities really illegal in the law, prosecute people, and I suspect that 90% of the problems will disappear automagically. Number of people who can become billionaires without committing borderline illegal and completely illegal activities are vanishingly small I suspect, probably only founders of megacorporations and those are often doing illegal stuff too to stay ahead. USA is an outlier probably as far as honest successful corporations go, but in other countries if you are a top100 Fortune person you are likely a criminal too. In my country for sure. Energy - illegal oligopoly, metallurgy - illegal oligopoly, animal farming - illegal oligopoly, etc. The number of illegal schemes happening in the big corps in my country is staggering.

Not to defend corruption, and I'll agree absolutely that there's a lot if room for improvement, but far too many people break far too many laws for full enforcement of any of them; and even outside egregious violations, law itself is too esoteric for most people to understand either their obligations or their rights.

With regard to the first part, the normal examples I give of this are road traffic offences (which if fully enforced would mean the only people allowed to drive would be those who didn't); and drug laws — ignore weed for now, nobody defends heroin, full enforcement of UK heroin laws would treble the UK prison population all by itself, while enforcing the laws on cocaine would more than double the US prison population and increase the British one by a factor of 20.

With regard to the second, look at how confused people get about copyright, trademarks, how they work, what the penalties are for violating them, what counts as "fair use", and so on.

We should focus on the large scale offenses by big entities of course. E.g. if you have 50% market share of chicken production in the country (and another 50% is also a single corporation) then I'm sure that both of the corporations are breaking a lot of laws and utilising a lot of barely legal schemes to launder profits. Same for all sectors of economy. Examples closer to us - ISPs, Cell operators, providers of cloud computing, search, communications etc. All of that must be carefully examined, and then partitioned where monopolies or conflicts of interests arise.

> Do you simply tax the shit out of people if they have over £1bn in wealth?

Seems like the obvious answer, though you're probably right in that people will move assets around and do elaborate things to avoid the tax but they already do that now.

Make a hard cap wealth cap at $1B. Oh you made a great investment that made you $400M dollars? oops looks like you're $200M over the cap. You now owe the government $200M. But good news you hit the $1B cap. You "win" capitalism. Have a nice medal maybe.

Seems reasonable to me.

I suppose the argument against it is that you'd be dissuading near billionaires from investing their money in things (eg. starting new companies) though I'm not entirely sure if money is a real motivator for people who have ~$900M. Is it? I don't know any 900 millionaires to ask.

A better attitude would be to say that billionaires need to share more of their wealth. If you make them pay a let's say 5% wealth tax for having excessive wealth, then they're not strongly discouraged from trying to increase their wealth, while everyone else benefits. And in due time they will cease to be billionaires.

How would you want to achieve that?