> I personally like Michael Pettis's argument that continued economic growth depends on increasing economic demand through redistributing wealth from capital (or more generally the wealthy) to labor [3], so I am skeptical of reforms that stop taxing capital.
This is an important point, and is misunderstood in (US) politics and deabtes, IMHO. Supporting capitalism and taxation aren't mutually exclusive positions. Well thought out taxation is crucial to balance the inherent network effects of large corporations. There's huge network effects, especially in tech [1], that leads to less ability for smaller firms or new players to compete. If anything, I'd wager that appropriate taxation of network effects is crucial to a well functioning capitalist society, especially as so much of success is due to luck and network effects in addition to hard work and talent [2].
Just because you have capital doesn't mean you have capitalism, where most any individual(s) can access capital to bring about new companies and products. The trick is defining empirically and scientifically sound taxation measures rather than giving into simplistic models of Socialism or Reganism.
This is an important point, and is misunderstood in (US) politics and deabtes, IMHO. Supporting capitalism and taxation aren't mutually exclusive positions. Well thought out taxation is crucial to balance the inherent network effects of large corporations. There's huge network effects, especially in tech [1], that leads to less ability for smaller firms or new players to compete. If anything, I'd wager that appropriate taxation of network effects is crucial to a well functioning capitalist society, especially as so much of success is due to luck and network effects in addition to hard work and talent [2].
Just because you have capital doesn't mean you have capitalism, where most any individual(s) can access capital to bring about new companies and products. The trick is defining empirically and scientifically sound taxation measures rather than giving into simplistic models of Socialism or Reganism.
1: https://medium.com/@nfx/70-of-value-in-tech-is-driven-by-net... 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068