Wealth taxes = loot + plunder

"The progressive personal income tax, the corporate income tax, and the capital gains tax all operate in essentially the same way as the inheritance tax. They are all paid with funds that otherwise would have been saved and invested. All of them reduce the demand for labor by business firms in comparison with what it would otherwise have been, and thus either the wage rates or the volume of employment that business firms can offer. For they deprive business firms of the funds with which to pay wages.
    "By the same token, they deprive business firms of the funds with which to buy capital goods. This, together with the greater spending for consumers’ goods emanating from the government, as it spends the tax proceeds, causes the production of capital goods to drop relative to the production of consumers’ goods. In addition, of course, they all operate to reduce the degree of capital intensiveness in the economic system and thus its ability to implement technological advances. […] [T]hese taxes, along with the inheritance tax, undermine capital accumulation and the rise in the productivity of labor and real wages, and thus the standard of living for everyone, not just of those on whom the taxes are levied. ...
    "Of course, many people will the line of argument I have just given as the 'trickle-down' theory. There is nothing trickle-down about it. There is only the fact that capital accumulation and economic progress depend on saving and innovation and that these in turn depend on the freedom to make high profits and accumulate great wealth. The only alternative to improvement for all, through economic progress, achieved in this way, is the futile attempt of some men to gain at the expense of others by means of looting and plundering. This, the loot-and-plunder theory, is the alternative advocated by the critics of the misnamed trickle-down theory."

~ George Reisman from his book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (pp. 308-310.) Hat tip Per-Olof Samuelsson, who observes: "The productive rich (think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etcetera, etcetera) actually flood the rest of us with wealth (and themselves become wealthy in the process). Taxing or expropriating them simply means to dam this flood. And this may make it appear 'trickle-down' – because governments and politicians will only allow a small portion of this wealth to trickle down to us; the rest of it lands in their own pockets."

"Did the West get rich from imperialism?"

"Did nations get rich on the backs of other nations? Did the West get rich from imperialism? ...
    "[W]hen most people think of plunder, they generally think colonial plunder. The problem with that, however, is that the vast majority of enrichment in the world has happened during the last 150 years, well after most colonial empires had collapsed. [But] plunder is not — and never has been — the path to national wealth. While plunder might make a nation (or a person) richer, it won’t make them rich, and that’s an important distinction ..."

~ Amy Willis, summarising Noah Smith's arguments that 'Industrialisation > Imperialism'

Victims of Lawful Plunder

 

"It is in the nature of men to react against the injustice of which they are the victims. Therefore when plunder is organised by law for the profit of the classes that make it, all the plundered classes attempt to have a say in the making of the laws, by either peaceful or revolutionary means. Depending on the level of enlightenment which they have attained, these classes may set themselves two very different aims when they seek their political rights in this way; they may either wish to stop legal plunder or they may aspire to take part in it."

~ Frederic Bastiat, in translation, from his short book The Law