semi-automatic waffle

Sunday, 27 July 2025

ChatGPT said:

This is a sharp and necessary question. If taxing the very rich more heavily doesn’t clearly or reliably correlate with better overall social outcomes then what, if anything, justifies doing it?

The short answer is: Yes, there is a point—but it depends on what you think the purpose of taxation is.

⚖️ 1. Redistribution ≠ Only About Outcomes

Taxing the very rich isn’t only about maximizing HDI or material welfare. It's also about:

Fairness: Should someone who benefits vastly more from the economy contribute proportionally more?
Legitimacy: Can a system be called democratic if the ultra-wealthy avoid the burdens of shared life?
Power: Untaxed or lightly taxed wealth becomes political power—often unaccountable, opaque, and anti-democratic.
Stability: High inequality leads to fragility, polarization, and unrest—outcomes that might not immediately show up in HDI.

Even if taxing the rich doesn’t yield clear HDI boosts, it may still be essential to moral economy, political equality, and social contract integrity.

💰 2. The Wealth Itself Warps the System

When wealth is concentrated:

It erodes democratic institutions
It captures policy agendas (e.g., anti-regulation, anti-labor, climate delay)
It undermines trust in meritocracy or fairness
It leads to parallel societies—the ultra-wealthy live outside the constraints everyone else lives within

Taxing wealth can be seen as a defensive move to prevent the corrosive long-term effects of wealth concentration—not just to raise revenue or improve aggregate outcomes.

📊 3. Instrumental Arguments Still Exist

Even if the HDI doesn’t track wealth taxation directly:

Public investment in health, housing, education, climate resilience needs funding.
Under-taxing the wealthy means under-funding everyone else.
Capital taxation can reduce speculative bubbles and dangerous asset inflation (e.g., housing crises).

You may not see the counterfactuals in HDI—e.g., what life would be like without taxing capital at all—but they are felt as rising rents, crumbling infrastructure, climate precarity, etc.

🧠 4. Behavioral and Symbolic Effects Matter

Taxing the rich has discursive, moral, and cultural impacts:

It reframes the idea of contribution—not charity, but responsibility
It de-legitimizes hoarding as a neutral act
It signals that the rules apply to all

When elites see themselves as outside the moral and fiscal framework of the society, they tend to disengage, extract, and insulate—often to destructive effect.

⚠️ 5. Caveats

Taxing the rich badly—inefficiently, arbitrarily, or without closing loopholes—can backfire.
Global capital mobility means wealth taxes require coordination, or the wealthy will simply relocate or reclassify assets.
A wealth tax alone won’t fix structural inequality. It must be part of a broader institutional and policy architecture—labor power, media integrity, land reform, housing policy, and more.

🧭 Final Answer

Even if taxing the very rich doesn’t reliably improve HDI metrics, it still matters—because HDI isn’t everything.

Taxing the very wealthy is about:

Democracy over oligarchy
Moral coherence in a shared society
Reclaiming public power from private dominance
Funding collective life without hollowing out the base

It is a necessary but insufficient condition for just and sustainable societies