Europe

They see it as the cornerstone of a progressive tax system that has helped to create one of Europe’s most equal societies.

Which is correct.

I've been waiting for "Scandinavian socialism" to be under more and more attack (by capitalist media and lobby, of course) for years. If the people are vulnerable to right-wing bullshit (which is most bullshit), then they'll destroy it. If not, it will survive. Most countries are vulnerable due to an educational system that fails to install critical thinking and the curiosity required to develop an understanding of the world (which makes bullshit stand out).

Cut through the noise, and the underlying conversation is nuanced. Norwegians discuss tax with confidence, because they have access to all the right data. Almost uniquely among democratic nations, the tax returns of named individuals are public, in a database that all citizens can access. Likewise, information on companies is detailed and reliable.

People also need the time to read it.

With a sovereign wealth fund that collects the profits from Norway’s abundant stocks of oil and gas able to contribute 25% of public spending each year, there is arguably no need for the formuesskatt.

Well... points at the climate.

Alstadsæter says the wealth tax is harder to dodge: “It’s the only tax that cannot be avoided through restructuring while living in Norway, hence the opposition.”

Nice. Everyone should have that!

Something tangential:

Is Inequality Inevitable? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/

We find it noteworthy that the best-fitting model for empirical wealth distribution discovered so far is one that would be completely unstable without redistribution rather than one based on a supposed equilibrium of market forces. In fact, these mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the “natural” wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy. It is only redistribution that sets limits on inequality.

The mathematical models also call attention to the enormous extent to which wealth distribution is caused by symmetry breaking, chance and early advantage (from, for example, inheritance). And the presence of symmetry breaking puts paid to arguments for the justness of wealth inequality that appeal to “voluntariness”—the notion that individuals bear all responsibility for their economic outcomes simply because they enter into transactions voluntarily—or to the idea that wealth accumulation must be the result of cleverness and industriousness. It is true that an individual's location on the wealth spectrum correlates to some extent with such attributes, but the overall shape of that spectrum can be explained to better than 0.33 percent by a statistical model that completely ignores them. Luck plays a much more important role than it is usually accorded, so that the virtue commonly attributed to wealth in modern society—and, likewise, the stigma attributed to poverty—is completely unjustified.

Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. In a flat redistribution scheme, all those possessing wealth below the mean would receive net funds, whereas those above the mean would pay. And precisely because current levels of inequality are so extreme, far more people would receive than would pay.