Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.

To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.

The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.

The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.