I wrote a short (ironic) piece in Financial Times last week that has attracted some attention. It was titled (by Financial Times) “Tax the socially wealthy, too!” You can find it here. From the title it is easy to draw the conclusion that I advocate more taxes. In fact, this is far from the truth. Instead, the letter was an ironic critique against the taxation of wealth, regardless of the shape of this wealth (i.e. savings, stocks, houses, social capital, human capital and so on).
What I try to do in my Financial Times letter is to give an illustrative example demonstrating the problems with wealth taxation. I suggest a way for social capital to be treated just like other forms of capital, and how those with a lot of social capital could give some of this capital (N.B. not money but social capital) to those who are poor in social capital. I exemplify this using Facebook since those with many Facebook friends probably have more social capital than those with fewer friends. In other words, some are socially wealthier than others. Ergo, if you have many Facebook friends, why not give some of these to those with fewer friends? In the name of fairness! Needless to say, such a tax could probably not be implemented successfully. The interesting question is instead whether a tax on peoples savings can be designed more successfully? And then we are back to the reason for why I wrote the article in the first place.....