The former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, once quipped that quantitative easing works in practice, but not in theory.

It's more than you can say about wealth taxes. Wealth taxes struggle in both theory and in practice.

Wealth taxes struggle in theory for at least three reasons.

First, wealth is notoriously hard to measure. The value of someone's equity or bond holdings might be straightforward (despite changing every few seconds), but how do you measure the value of a small business so you can tax it? Even property can be tricky.

The second problem is that, even if we can measure the value of wealth, we would be taxing unrealised gains.

The above small business owner would need to come up with big sums of money, forcing them to liquidate part of the business, take out

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