Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encoura

Absentee owners should be taxed out of existence. The distance between an investment and the people who understand it is a law enforcement liability (it encourages fraud), a public liability (it inevitably concentrates ownership who can easily lobby and get bailouts), and leads to missed opportunities and inefficient use. The mass US real estate fraud that ended in 2008 was entirely built around loaning money to people who weren't creditworthy for overvalued property that they had no expertise to judge, then immediately selling that loan to somebody who would hide it in a complex product and immediately sell it again. Eventually, these was sold to municipalities and pension funds in complex gambling vehicles whose value would fall to zero if anything went wrong in this structure, after being branded "AAA" by institutions 1) paid by the people selling the products, and 2) literally written into legislation by name and into the rules governing the pension funds. That's what distance between an investor and in investment gets you. Tax every single hop. Make them break themselves up. edit: Yes it does. Tax them. These transactions cost the public more than direct transactions. I know that people feel like they're far beyond having to justify a tax other than "I like it, so don't tax it," but this distance in and of itself imposes costs to the public. If you dump money into Vanguard, and Vanguard then invests in an index, Vanguard gets taxed and you get taxed, too. Poof, no more Vanguard. The horrible outcome of that is that people understand the stocks they're investing in, and that the stock market becomes a repository of intelligence - which is what I thought was supposed to justify it. Nobody cares about justice, though. They're libertarians when they're rich and revolutionaries when they're poor. Government to protect my stuff when I have stuff, government that gives me stuff when I don't have stuff.