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The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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I mean the extremely literal answer is roughly:
All counties/cities have a bureaucracy dedicated to doing the equivalent of yearly audits to determine your home/property's value.
This does not exist for corporate capital assets.
Instead, the audits are privately conducted (either internally or via a contracted private accounting firm), and valuations are basically only issued around time of sale, when corporate capital changes specific private ownership.
Even earnings reports are not done by an outside agency for the purposes of assessing a tax, they're either done privately by the owner (again, internal or contracted out), or as private market research for something like a hedge fund or something like that.
We as a society (legal system?) just decided that homes get a bureaucracy and taxation, capital does not, it plays by different rules.
And by that what I really mean is that ever since FDR, the wealthy have conspired to construct this legal reality bit by bit, compromise by compromise, PR campaign by PR campaign, over time.
So that gets us eventually to Citizens United where money buys elections and laws officially and thus Democracy dies.
Its... its the oligarchy baked into the system, been like this for quite a long time.
Its not that its... any kind of theoretically impossible to imagine a or many different kinds of systems...
Its that rich people have rigged so many things so far in their favor, for so long, that they believe these artificial engineered differences ... are fundamental rules of reality.
Like yes they're very hubristic and classist... but a part of it is that they've basically indoctrinated themselves into thinking this is... objectively correct. Its sort of like a religion, its their dogma.
I will note that at least some billionaires don't buy into this dogma nearly at all... either out of genuine empathy and humanity, or pure self preservation of not wanting to be guillotined... you do end up with the 'Tom Steyer <-> Mr Wonderful' spectrum.
Of course, the Steyer types are exceedingly uncommon.