Forcing oligarchs to keep their yachts, would be a much more severe sanction.

In those very rare moments the desire to own a yacht sets in, I remember the saying that the second happiest day for a millionaire is when he buys himself a super-duper yacht but, the happiest one, is that day he sells it.

With this in mind why should we advance the oligarchs such happiness? It could be much more effective to have a judge order him to keep the yacht and its crew in tip-top conditions for the next twenty years, and, if failing to do so, have to spend five years doing community service.

Warning! Let's not wake up to taxpayers having to pay unemployment benefits to many fired yacht-crews and pick up huge yacht-maintenance costs.

I warn so because though there must be tremendous buyer market in Russian oligarch yachts, few buyers, or none, will dare to show up. What's the future for this yachts: luxurious restaurants or tourist attractions like fancy Russian Faberge eggs floating museums?

Please, the more you feel enemies to your grandchildren’s way of life could be accumulating too much resources, would you not love for as much of these as possible to be frozen in unproductive assets, like fancy super-yachts?

So, is confiscating yachts a really potent way to fight a war and bring peace?

As also applies when taxing wealth it is important to consider if assets, like yachts, are to be sold, who are the buyers and what would they otherwise have done with that money. Would you, e.g., like an able entrepreneur to freeze his money/purchase-power in a luxurious yacht? And are we really sure those who will receive that money, e.g., the bureaucracy of turn, will give it a better use?

Warning! Just let not confiscations become somebody’s profitable business. 

I say this because, when selling a confiscated asset, e.g., a Russian oligarch’s super-yacht, what’s really obtained, effectively confiscated, is the money somebody else has willingly put into that useless asset.

Redistributing wealth is not as straightforward as redistribution profiteers want us to think.

I posted a thread with 8 tweets 

Louis XII could be the filthy rich who gave up main-street purchase power to commission Leonardo da Vinci to paint Salvator Mundi. 500 years later another filthy rich freezes $450 million of his own purchase capacity, hanging that painting on a wall. Bad or great? 

Why are just the "filthy rich", like Louis XII and the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi cursed? Why not Leonardo da Vinci, or the current vendor of Salvator Mundi? Could they‘ve not just as well used money they got from filthy rich for something “more worthwhile”?

Does it all boil down to that Louis XII should not have commissioned Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi and instead have bought food for the poor? I guess that would then depend on what the food suppliers did with that money, grow more food or drink more gin. Life isn’t easy

We can just pray that something of that main-street-purchasing-power comes into the hands of the few risk-taking entrepreneurs who, with luck, help catapult our world forward. Sadly, with risk weighted capital requirements for banks, regulators have made that less possible.

Yes, life isn’t easy. So let us all beware of all those redistribution profiteers out to make money or gain political power and who tell us “Let us just redistribute the wealth of the filthy rich, and you will all live in Nirvana. Venezuela, Nirvana? My …!!!

If Louis XX commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint Salvator Mundi, would it not make a beautiful novel to trace how that money flowed, perhaps to a Bill Gates, generating wealth so that someone could freeze $450 million on a wall, and keep the human development ball rolling? 

 

These ramblings about how the “filthy rich” convert their main-street-purchasing-power into assets and services, some that would never have existed without them started when seeing a totally useless shield in the Louvre in Paris.

Just in case, this is not a point blank defense of the “filthy rich”. It refers strictly to how their purchase power morphs into assets and services. Many “filthy rich” do become so in unjust and corrupt ways, quite often highly detrimental to development.

PS. A tweet: "A tax on wealth? Ok! But please, what assets should the wealthy sell to whom, in order to raise the money to pay it? And what would the buyers otherwise have done with the money they also must raise? And so on, and on, in the circle of the economy’s life."

PS. A tweet: "A conundrum. How to structure a tax on wealth without reducing the wealth that is taxed?"

PS. This of course does not mean that I am not in favor of reducing inequality. For that I strongly believe in the need for an unconditional universal basic income, a Societal Dividend

PS. When it comes to wealth, yachts are often depicted… but rarely do we see any interest in what those yacht-builders did with the money they received.

PS. Let’s hope taxpayers will not be surprised finding out they now have to pick up huge bills for maintaining some Russian oligarchs confiscated super yachts.

PS. Legend holds that when 1974’s Carnation Revolution’s, chief strategist Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho told Sweden’s Olof Palme in Lisbon: “In Portugal we want to get rid of the rich”, Palme replied, “how curious, in Sweden we only aspire to get rid of the poor”