I don’t even know why people despise billionaires. They didn’t take anything from anyone. You willingly gave them money in exchange for a valuable service, such as anything to your door within a day or a cool electric vehicle. They paid their workers the prevailing market wage. If they paid more, they’d get undercut by competitors. Most of their assets are within the companies they own, so they’d either need to take out a large loan or liquidate ownership over time in companies they own to pay a wealth tax. We could take the dollar of every single billionaire in the U.S. and it would only close our nation’s deficit for 1.5 years.

I genuinely believe it all comes down to envy. That, and the misplaced notion that we could punitively tax them without any second-order effects to pay for some kind of utopia.

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity. The only things that provide a nation with success are the rule of law, courts, property rights, and a free market. Everything else is a Big Rock Candy Mountain fantasy.