...vigorously searching iTunes....

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---= The forest breathes, listen.
-Native American elder

Let's say I have a ton of gold under my mattress. Would we suggest that taxing the gold mass every year is fair?

Let's say I have $100 in my cookie jar. Would it be fair to send me a bill for the tax value of that $100

Tax profit off the investment. Not the principal.

I was giving you my, very limited understanding of 'wealth taxation.'

And yeah, I think they'll tax you until the end of time.

As a guy who builds mathematical models in my head I find some merit to the concept. Enough to explore through some basic economic computer models.

I'm a big fan of market dynamics. But there need to be safeguards, fuse-able links and firewalls.

Anyway that's my understanding of the issues involving tax policy at some political event.

Models. They work on things that have great physical rigor.

Having worked with the results of environmental models and modelers over the years, being told that a model provides a certain output makes me less likely to buy-in.

My view of modeling is wonderfully expressed in a book entitled, "Useless Arithmetic", http://www.amazon.com/Useless-Arithmetic-Environmental-Scientists-Predict/dp/0231132123

When economics can predict a singular event, I'll listen to economic models. Until then, I consider them marvelously complex art.

Physics, chemistry, material science, etc these are the worlds I know best. That said I have benefited from modeling fuzzier systems and would be interested in some basic analysis of wealth taxation.

Too often I find our existing biases will blind us to improvements. There may be benefits to wealth-taxation. I'm not automatically opposed to it.

I cannot imagine any economic concept that doesn't have some benefit for somebody.

I do not believe that a policy should be enacted because it benefits the most numbers of people.

First, economics is not a science, it is a complex art. So to enact a policy is an exercise in performance art.

Therefore, one should evaluate the necessity of some interventionist policy (sens lat) on ethics and aesthetics, not pseudoscience.

In most cases, in a free society, government doing nothing is better than government doing something. This applies to taxation.

OTOH, Adam Smith had it right about 'trusts' being a great threat to free market. His concern was mostly the vast inherited wealth of the nobility, but it increasingly applies to the United States, unfortunately.

Exploring through mathematical modeling is not intrinsically 'pseudo-science.'

It's what people do with the results that determines that.

A good model may reveal unforeseen consequences.

Seems pretty limiting to state categorically that it wont be examined.

FYI - I'd call it a complex discipline, but surely closer to science than art.

My comment was directed toward economic forecast modeling -- this is what most people use to describe future funding requirements for any given gov program. Though the models have become incredibly more mathematically complex and are internally consistent, they still perform abysmally. Continuing research on them is a fine thing and will generate PhD's for the foreseeable future.

However, given the track record of economic modeling, I'll take the Black Eightball and save money.

Better still, use a general conceptual model. That is a useful approach and provides a fine contextualization for policy. Don't rely on a mathematical model. Everything that a conceptual model is, a mathematical model is not.