You mean like this,
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and providefor the common Defence and general Welfare of the UnitedStates; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
You can attempt to argue that section 9, clause 4 would prevent a wealth tax but structured properly, as an indirect tax, a wealth tax would be constitutional, just like there would be no problem adapting a VAT.
This is not difficult to understand. Yes, if the wealthy dude sells his stocks and buys a new yacht, sure, that creates jobs. But if he sells his stock and buys another stock with it, what jobs are being created, the traders?
I have attempted to explain rent-seeking to you numerous times. It just seems to fly over your head. The classic example is political donations, especially through dark money. Another good example is patent evergreening by pharmaceutical companies. You can go ahead and look up what that means. But lets go with a real world example.
Ingles is a grocery chain based out of Asheville, NC. They dominate the Asheville market for one simple reason, they buy up all available suitable properties in which a competitor can build. Go east about sixty miles and you get to Hickory, NC, where I call home. Lowe's Foods is owned by Alex Lee, they are based in Hickory. In a stretch that is not more than ten miles long, Highway 127, there are four Lowe's supermarkets. There were two independent grocery stores, Alex Lee bought them and converted them to Lowe's. Another was a former Harris Teeter, Alex Lee got that in a mind-boggling deal the entailed trading locations. Harris Teeter got the Charlotte market, Lowe's got Hickory. All the Lowe's stores in Charlotte became Harris Teeters, there are no Lowe's in Charlotte, they have only recently ventured into nearby markets. There are no Harris Teeters anywhere near Hickory.
That is rent seeking. Spending, not to produce more, but to take more of the business that is already there through the additional profits enabled by a near monopoly position. If competition would result in a price of five dollars a pound for ground beef, but the monopolistic position results in six dollars a pound ground beef, that extra dollar is what is called "rents"
Stiglitz talks a lot about rent seeking behavior. I will leave you to do the research. But take this away, A free market is not a market free from government regulation. That was not what Adam Smith was referring to, he openly states that there is a place for government in a functioning demand economy. A free market is free from rents.
No it doesn't. Supply side never flippin works. Say's Law is not only dead, it is stupid. Say's Law says the reason horse buggy making companies went under is because they didn't make enough buggies. A demand economy is called a demand economy for a damn reason. The alternative is a command economy, yes, Communism. The whole supply side bullshit is just one of the multitude of ways the wealthy have manipulated the gullible.
If U.S. billionaires paid taxes at the same rate as the middle class—roughly 15% to 22%—instead of benefiting from current strategies that allow them to pay an effective tax rate as low as 3.4% on their wealth growth, the government could raise hundreds of billions of dollars in additional annual revenue. For example, data shows that the top 25 billionaires' wealth increased by $401 billion from 2014 to 2018, but they paid only $13.6 billion in federal income taxes (an effective rate of 3.4%). If taxed at a 20% rate on that growth, they would have paid about $80 billion instead1.
