The first example is a red-herring. Successful professionals. It's worth, what?, 5 or 10 millions euros. Those are not an issue. My problem is with Silvio Berlusconi, the Bush family, Francois-Henri Pinault, those levels of wealth.
Essentially, the division is between people who are well off but fully dependent on society and its common infrastructure for their daily life - police, hospitals, etc. - and those are rich enough to try to isolate themselves and abstract their person from society while profiting from its benefits and influencing it for their sole benefit.
This argument is a common plow in debates about taxation: conflating vastly different levels of wealth as a single issue. The right wing is using it actively, because 1) they are paid to do that and 2) it creates a false solidarity between well-off upper middle class, most of it meritocratic in nature and who are politically influential, and the truly rich, who, by dint of their very small numbers, have no influence except the one they buy. The left wing is also falling for it and helping the right-wing by making the same conflation by hammering the upper middle classes (easy) rather than attacking the truly rich (a far more complex task and, occasionally, a dangerous one).
As I mentioned in another comment, asset taxes, inheritance taxes and very high taxation of very high incomes are not an issue of social justice and redistribution but a matter of institutional stability and democratic health.
"And as all the examples others brought up, were about much bigger wealth, the question is, amplifying wealth to which degree, so that e.g. one answer to my example could have been, to speak about a wealth tax only for the people who are much richer than just a selfused property, even if it is a house in Munich. [...]"
I was asked to bring up examples why somebody doesn't use a viable asset to make revenue from it. Actually I was the wrong receiver, as Migeru brought the idea up, that wealth should be taxed because otherwise productive assets might not be used. You could have said before what dimension of wealth we are talking...
I in general dislike such taxes, but if the wealth is so much that as you say it is a matter of institutional stability and democratic health, I agree that something has to be done, despite one can discuss what. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
Although I think that a case can actually be made for taxing a single person living alone in a two-family house at levels he will find painful.
First, such taxes serve to restrain speculative bubbles in the real estate market - bubbles that do real harm to first-time buyers even on the occasions where they are deflated more or less peacefully, nevermind the cases where they bring the whole economy to a screeching halt.
Second, if you have an apartment designed for ten to fifteen people (yes, we actually have such apartments in Copenhagen), then you have to supply public infrastructure for ten to fifteen people, because infrastructure planning has a somewhat longer time horizon than home-ownership (at least good infrastructure planning has).
And finally, I would remark that living space in cities is a very much finite resource - and I think it's fair enough that people who hold down more than the average share of finite and valuable resources pay through their nose for the privilege.
But that is a somewhat different discussion (then again, this thread has been threadjacked so many times already, so what's one more...)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
