They tax what they can see and print what they can’t. Either way, you pay.
A conversation started this. Our bimonthly meeting at The Bitcoin Adviser brings together people from very different parts of the world, and without naming names or pretending I followed every detail, this one moved across Australia, California, and, through my own lens, Colombia.
At first the three have nothing in common. Australia is wealthy, with strong institutions, deep markets, and a predictable tax system. Colombia is middle-income, carrying more fiscal pressure, more informality, deeper inequality, and lower trust in the state. California is not even a country. Yet set them beside one another and the same instinct surfaces in each. When promises, debt, and political pressure grow faster than the economy beneath them, governments reach first for the capital they can see: the capital that is visible, regulated, and assumed to be locked in place. Only first, though. When that runs short, a second tool is always waiting.
That is the connection. Not identical structures, but one shared reflex.
Australia is the gentle version. The government is adjusting the edges of a mature system, and it takes care to call the change a correction rather than a wealth tax. From 1 July 2026, a new tax called Division 296 applies higher rates to superannuation earnings on the largest balances, with a steeper tier again above A$10 million.
What the proposal originally contained is the part worth slowing down for. It would have taxed unrealized gains, meaning the rising paper value of assets nobody had actually sold. After sustained criticism, the government backed away and confined the tax to realized earnings.
The retreat told its own story. One of the most predictable systems in the world had reached for money no one had yet received, and let go only because people pushed back. Retirement accounts are not simply balances; they are long promises that people build their lives around for decades. The episode never turned on the final percentage. It turned on the discovery that the rules surrounding visible, locked-in wealth are now treated as adjustable, and that the only brake was resistance.
This is also where the obvious objection answers itself. The variable is predictability, not how high the tax climbs. Stable systems can sustain relatively heavy taxation for years without anyone fleeing. Trouble begins the moment a predictable system starts behaving as though the original bargain can be reopened.
Colombia is blunter about it. In February 2026, after Congress rejected the government’s financing law, the Petro administration declared an economic emergency and used a decree to create an exceptional wealth tax on companies. Any business with net equity above roughly USD 2.8 million, frozen at its value on a single morning, 1 March 2026, now owes. Most pay half a percent; financial institutions and the oil-and-mining sector pay more than triple that. For the first time, Colombia’s wealth tax reaches legal entities rather than individuals, and the Constitutional Court has yet to rule on whether any of it is lawful.
Two details deserve attention. The tax arrived through emergency powers only after the ordinary legislative process had refused it. And it pinned every obligation to a single valuation snapshot. Targeting legible capital tends to look exactly like this in practice: the balance sheet is already known, the date is already chosen, and the bill follows almost on its own.
Capital noticed at once. The head of the country’s petroleum association warned that the heavier burden competes directly with the money that would otherwise fund exploration. Whether or not his warning persuades you, it is the sound of capital recalculating in real time.
None of this depends on a single politician. Heading into the June 21 runoff, Iván Cepeda has campaigned on deepening the same agenda: more redistribution, a larger role for the state in correcting inequality, and an expanded welfare system funded by widening the tax base and taxing the wealthiest. He belongs to a broad current that treats the state as the primary instrument for redistributing economic power.
The message resonates for honest reasons. Colombia lives with deep inequality, real insecurity, and millions of families a single emergency away from crisis. When a politician argues that the wealthy should contribute more, the claim is hardly irrational. It answers a country whose social contract still feels unfinished.
All of which is what makes the question genuinely hard. I believe in helping people: families, education, health, old age, anyone with no safety net beneath them. What I doubt is whether generosity improves once it becomes compulsory, open-ended, and controlled by a state that can keep enlarging the bill. I would rather decide for myself where I give, whom I help, and how much I can responsibly carry.
A practical edge runs underneath the moral one. When the burden grows too heavy or too unpredictable, people and companies adjust. They restructure, they slow their investment, they take the next venture elsewhere. A country that loses them forfeits far more than tax revenue. It forfeits the people who might have built businesses, funded jobs, supported families, and solved problems the state never reaches. No society becomes more generous by making its productive base feel trapped.
California earns a footnote here rather than a chapter. Even in one of the most productive economies on earth, high earners and capital still respond to incentives. Capital, it turns out, can read a tax table and book a flight. That hardly makes every tax increase an exodus, but it does mean capital is never as stationary as the people taxing it like to assume.
The risk simply takes a different shape in each place. Australia’s danger is the slow erosion of predictability, since rules that shift too often teach people to stop trusting that long-term planning still means what they were promised. Colombia’s danger is more fragile, because capital under real pressure does not lodge a complaint.
It leaves.
It hides.
It slips into the informal economy.
It waits.
It stops believing the rules.
Once that belief is gone, the state’s instinct is rarely to loosen its grip. It tightens.
Every case shares one trait. The capital repriced first is always the capital easiest to see and hardest to imagine moving: superannuation sealed inside a regulated fund, corporate equity pinned to a valuation date, income visible on one public ledger or another. Legible, and presumed stuck.
Taxation, though, is only the lever you can see. When a government cannot or will not raise enough through it, a quieter tool remains: it can expand the money supply and let the shortfall settle on everyone holding the currency. That cost arrives without a vote, without a valuation date, without a threshold to stay beneath. And it tends to fall hardest on the people the state says it is protecting, because they are the least able to move into the assets that outrun it.
This is precisely why discussions of savings, custody, pensions, debt, capital mobility, and Bitcoin sit inside politics rather than beside it. They are the same conversation viewed from the other direction. If the working rule is that whatever can be seen and assumed immovable can be repriced, then the sensible reply is to hold at least part of what you build in a form the state cannot as easily see, freeze, or dilute.
This is no argument against contributing. It is an argument against mistaking what you owe for whatever happens to be easy to find and simple to take.
Which leaves one question standing.
When the rules change, and eventually they always do, who controls the value you spent your life building?
Dalia Platt is one of our advisers at The Bitcoin Adviser. This article first appeared on her personal substack. For more content from Dalia, you can subscribe there, of if you'd like to speak with her about your security and estate planning needs, please click the link below.