The financial intelligentsia has finally emerged from their mahogany-lined dens to deliver a decree: taxing wealth "makes no sense." It is a charmingly redundant observation, akin to pointing out that a drowning man doesn’t need a glass of water. Of course, the arguments for wealth taxes are incoherent; they are birthed from the same fevered, desperate imaginations that believe a change in government policy will somehow transform the human animal into something other than a grasping, self-interested primate. We are currently witnessing a debate between two groups of people who shouldn't be allowed to handle a toaster, let alone a national economy.

On one side of this intellectual wasteland, we have the "Eat the Rich" brigade—a collection of performative activists who view the economy as a simple game of Robin Hood, oblivious to the fact that the modern Sheriff of Nottingham has already digitized the gold and hidden the private keys in a jurisdiction that doesn’t appear on Google Maps. They argue that by skimming the surface of a billionaire’s unrealized gains, we might finally fund the utopia they’ve been promised by people who have never held a real job. It is a lovely fantasy, fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of what wealth actually is in the twenty-first century. Wealth is no longer a vault full of coins; it is a digital hallucination, a series of leveraged bets on companies that lose money but possess "disruptive potential." You cannot tax a vibe, yet they persist in trying to squeeze blood from a spreadsheet.

Then we have the defenders of the status quo, the authors of these "sophisticated arguments" who claim that wealth taxes are inefficient, difficult to administer, and damaging to investment. They aren't wrong; they’re just boring. They speak of "capital flight" as if the money hasn't already fled to a server in the Cayman Islands years ago. They worry about "disincentivizing innovation," as if the primary motivation for the next tech mogul isn't anything other than a pathologically oversized ego and a desire to escape the crushing boredom of their own existence. These economists treat the billionaire class like a rare species of orchid that will wilt if the room temperature changes by half a degree, rather than the resilient, parasitic organisms they actually are. They protect the dragons not out of love, but out of a cowering fear that the fire might stop providing warmth to their own tiny, academic cottages.

The core of the issue, which both sides ignore with a practiced, professional myopia, is that the modern state is a giant, leaking bucket. Even if we were to successfully pry the billions from the cold, manicured hands of the elite, the result would be the same. The money would be poured into the bureaucratic abyss, filtered through thirteen layers of oversight, and eventually spent on a military-industrial complex that specializes in turning tax dollars into expensive craters in distant deserts. The idea that this capital would somehow be "redistributed" to the needy is the greatest joke of all. The only thing the government redistributes is disappointment. To suggest that giving more money to a system that managed to lose trillions in a single generation is the solution to inequality is a form of mental illness we’ve rebranded as progressivism.

Taxing wealth makes no sense because nothing about our current economic configuration makes sense. We live in a world where a teenager can make forty million dollars by dancing on a screen for fifteen seconds, while the people who grow the food are considered an inconvenient overhead cost to be automated away. We are arguing about the morality of a ledger that is fundamentally fraudulent. The sophisticated arguments against the tax are merely a way of acknowledging that the system is too fragile to survive an encounter with reality. If you start pulling on the loose threads of the billionaire’s sweater, you eventually realize the sweater is made of nothing but debt, optimism, and the collective delusion of the masses. If the wealth tax were actually implemented, it wouldn't build schools; it would build more compliance departments.

In the end, this debate serves as a convenient distraction for a public that prefers outrage to understanding. It allows the left to feel righteous and the right to feel prudent, while the rest of us watch the planet's resources get converted into data points that will eventually be deleted by a cosmic solar flare or a particularly aggressive AI. To tax or not to tax? It is the question of the decade, posed by people who are too terrified to admit that we are all trapped on a sinking ship, arguing over who gets to hold the gold bars while we tread water. Let them keep their wealth; they’ll need it to buy the best seats for the apocalypse. It’s not like the government was going to build us a lifeboat anyway. Humanity's greatest achievement isn't the creation of wealth, but our endless ability to invent new ways to be miserable about it.