The Spanish government’s announcement that it plans to introduce a new “solidarity tax” on the wealth of those who possess over €3 million has again brought to the fore the debate about taxes levied on wealth and capital. The issue is not merely that the announcement is highly politicized in what is already, de facto, a preelection period, nor that it could disrupt the fiscal autonomy of Madrid, Andalusia, and Galicia. (Let us recall that these regions comprise eighteen million Spanish people; that is, almost 38 percent of Spain’s total population.)

In the laboratory of history, great inflation followed by great disinflation opens the road to monetary regime change. Sometimes the road leads to a better place. Think of the US return to gold in 1879 following the inflationary issue of greenbacks during the Civil War; or the era of the hard deutsche mark when the German Bundesbank responded to the great inflation and bust of the late 1960s and early 1970s by insulating its money from continuing US inflationary storms.

They read like Civil War battlefields: Chattanooga, Tennessee; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Greer, South Carolina; West Point, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Tupelo, Mississippi; Smyrna, Tennessee. They are the towns and small cities in the Deep South where America now builds its cars and trucks.

Take Greer, for example (population of thirty-five thousand as of 2020). Located in the foothills of the bucolic Blue Ridge Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina, it is home to the BMW US manufacturing plant.

Most people are familiar with the Panama Canal, but they probably don’t know the first effort to build the Panama Canal, spanning almost a decade, was by France. Facing considerable initial naysaying and ridicule, Ferdinand de Lesseps had the acumen and drive to construct the Suez Canal. Success was realized after overcoming many obstacles and difficulties. Naturally enough, France turned to him to build a sea-level canal in Panama.

According to Wikipedia, Bernie Madoff ran the world’s largest Ponzi scheme. The losses were estimated to be as high as $65 billion. Madoff had promised to invest his customers’ money in productive enterprises and pay them generous returns, when in fact he spent the money and manufactured fake statements. His returns to his customers were funded with money from new customers. The scheme collapsed when money from new entrants slowed down. There were no productive investments to use to pay off his customers.