It's hard. But if we make CG inescapable it should as a second order effect close the Buy Borrow Die loophole, and the super rich must fund their life some other way. Probably by selling assets to consume.
And putting a tamper on inheritance (which could be progressively taxed or capped) it has a second order effect of discouraging hoarding while alive.
So increasing inheritance tax (effectively) would mean a change of incentives for hoarding money. Which is the only thing that actually works.
Obviously, being a hard problem, there's no quick fix. But in the choice between slowing down the problem and not, we should do the former.
How do we "prevent" it? Well, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that your proposal?
By taking the excess yearly, and that's very doable.
When Bezos divorced, Mackenzie Bezos was awarded 25% of their Amazon shares valued at over 38 billion dollars.
Just by the above being possible, that means there's no reason why such a "divorce" couldn't happen once per year, and there's also no reason why it has to be 25% rather than "everything above 100M". It means that the tools for this exist. The government takes the place of Mackenzie Bezos. During the divorce, not a single mention of "oh it's just _impossible_ to take 25% of Jeff Bezos' Amazon shares, it will cause collapse". Just all of a sudden if you replace MacKenzie Bezos with "the government" or "the pension fund", suddenly there's all kinds of supposed reasons why it can't happen - even though there's zero reason why it couldn't.
No "but technically they will temporarily have over 100M in the intermediary period" please.
I’msure they will just ensure they will never reach 100m and stash their cash somewhere hidden. So won’t work that well. But might work for a one off cut. Which is good.
You can simply mandate by law that these sells must be sold to the market at, say, 2% per month, and that the government will not make use of voting rights during that period.
Revolutionaries often overestimate the appetite in the general populace for revolution. Also I'm not sure guillotines will be able to do much against the killer drones that palmer luckey is making
