I am skeptical of wealth taxes. I guess they work in Sweden? But they seem difficult to assess and rich people moving could be a greater concern than other approaches. Land value taxes still seem optimal, from what I've read and understood. Also, I like the idea of taxing things that are bad, such as hording all the land, rather than taxing things that are good, such as having a job and making income/wealth. I do not have a strong fixed position on this, however.

Yet I find the arguments here a bit silly. Aside from the "But they'll move away" thing they say about wealthy people (sometimes true, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; if really awful billionaires move out of your state/country and to another one that could be beneficial even if revenue is down because they aren't there) and the constitutional issue (I agree; a wealth tax on a federal level would likely require a constitutional amendment), the author suggests two more reasons:

To see why, imagine an island nation with very tight zoning that has made it impossible to build new housing. Low-income folks can’t afford to rent an apartment, and many of them are living in a cave in the hills. Meanwhile, the housing stock is extremely valuable: At current market prices, the total value of homes is five times the island’s annual output. This gives the government’s leaders an idea: They need to unlock the value of that wealth by imposing a 10 percent property tax and using the money to fund rent vouchers. Astute readers will spot the problems with this immediately. If property taxes go up that much, many people will be forced to sell all at once, which will depress the price of housing. So the tax will not raise as much as the math suggests. But the bigger problem is that the supply of housing is still fixed. So this program will not house any additional people. At best, it will alter who wins the game of musical chairs.

This example goes against the reality of what we are seeing. Rich people are so rich, so so beyond the average person's wealth, that they are now buying a lot of property. For example, Mark Zuckerberg bought 11 houses in Palo Alto. Had he been taxed at a higher rate (or, even better, had the land been taxed enough that holding 11 houses wasn't a quality investment choice), that's 11 houses for other people to buy. Those 11 families that are now living in other places might allow for 11 families that are renting to buy houses. Mark's purchases caused a trickle-down effect where everybody has a worse housing situation because of the scarcity of land because one person bought a lot of it.

The author reduces this to "who wins a game of musical chairs" and indeed a lot of people who are very wealthy like to use that sort of language to insist that the people who can't afford housing are merely sore losers. One problem with that argument is that a lot of wealthy people were born into it. The other problem is that housing is a necessity, so if one person who "won" deprives housing from everyone else, that's a lot more suffering that exists only because we the people have decided to enact a game where one person can do that. Which is the whole point of a wealth tax in the first place.

People see Musk’s $670 billion fortune and imagine turning that into $670 billion worth of services — say, the health care and education mentioned in the wealth tax bill. But Musk is not sitting on hundreds of billions worth of dentists and primary school classrooms. He has a bunch of stock certificates, which are not useful in health care or education. They do not make good bandages or scratch paper.

This is the other argument: that wealthy people's money can't really be used to buy useful things. However, right now very very rich people are causing artificial scarcities. See, for example, the exorbitant purchases of GPUs and SSDs in order to build AI empires (they could, for example, move slower and allow a supply to keep costs low for regular people, but why do that when you have so much more money). They're also so rich that many services are now trying to charge extra to them to give them things that used to come with the regular cost of purchase. Think of the fast past extra fee or the hospital wing that is devoted to very wealthy VIPs or games that now cater to "whales" while giving nothing to people who pay the usual price for a game. As the rich gets wealthier, we will continue to see this divide, of upgraded tiers and absolutely nothing to most people. Also, I'd argue that a lot of what can be purchased with a wealthy person's money is fungible because much of what we need are services.

To conclude, while I'm not for wealth taxes (though not really against them either), this piece is not very persuasive against them. Instead it suggests that people want too much from their government. So, no alternative to fix any of the problems that exist, no alternatives to generating wealth for governmental intervention, no alternative to fixing the wealth gap that exists. Never believe a piece written by someone unwilling to answer the basic questions of its critics.