A wealth tax would be ethically wrong and economically
destructive  It was John Maynard Keynes who put it best.
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist,” he wrote.  Remarkably, as the clamour for
wealth taxes demonstrates, the thinker who has re-emerged, yet
again, as the guru of the moment is one Karl Marx, buried in
London’s Highgate Cemetery 130 years ago and supposedly long
since consigned to the dustbins of history.  Marx, of course,
was not the first to argue that there is such a thing as ill-
begotten “unearned” income, the fruits of capital in the form of
rent, interest, dividends or capital gains, not to be confused
with earned income from selling one’s labour. But somewhere deep
in Britain’s collective consciousness, even among passionate
opponents of socialism, some Marxist ideas remain influential,
albeit in an implicit, cultural sort of way. A “heavy
progressive or graduated income tax” and a war on