Maybe feeding the troll, but in case you were serious...
My point was that the author is forced to use some arbitrary standard like "publicly traded" since such a proposal is inherently unworkable for illiquid investments. But in doing so, the author creates an obvious problem: if "publicly traded" is the litmus test for this new mark-to-market tax, then investors will move investments into non-public vehicles to avoid paying the tax.
As to your second point, the amount of publicly traded float is not zero sum: companies regularly go public and take themselves private to achieve financial, governance, and other objectives. So it is not the case that anyone necessarily would be paying the mark-to-market tax on shares of a currently publicly traded company, any more than it is the case that having an X% corporate tax rate means US companies pay X% of profits in tax to the US government.
If this proposal were enacted, future-incredibly-valuable company F woud avoid becoming a publicly traded company entirely. Facebook, which the author cites because it's headline-grabbing, harms rather than helps his case: they've intentionally avoided going public until now, and could into the arbitrary future if it were especially onerous for the founders/investors for the company to do so. The rational expectation of Facebook principals right now is that the benefits of going public (at least for the founders and investors) outweigh the negatives, because there is a massive liquidity and valuation improvement from doing so.
But under the author's proposal, that cost/benefit analysis would change, and companies would simply stay private and achieve liquidity for founders and investors via other mechanisms. Over time, these mechanisms would evolve into processes that were as close to indistinguishable from public company registration as possible without actually triggering the language of the market-to-market tax law. SEC rules about selling shares to non-qualified investors would still hold, obviously, but I'm sure with so much potential tax to be saved, investors would find ways to legally aggregate non-qualified investors into qualified vehicles to get around this. Or just live with qualified investors, and no others, owning their companies.
My point was that the author is forced to use some arbitrary standard like "publicly traded" since such a proposal is inherently unworkable for illiquid investments. But in doing so, the author creates an obvious problem: if "publicly traded" is the litmus test for this new mark-to-market tax, then investors will move investments into non-public vehicles to avoid paying the tax.
As to your second point, the amount of publicly traded float is not zero sum: companies regularly go public and take themselves private to achieve financial, governance, and other objectives. So it is not the case that anyone necessarily would be paying the mark-to-market tax on shares of a currently publicly traded company, any more than it is the case that having an X% corporate tax rate means US companies pay X% of profits in tax to the US government.
If this proposal were enacted, future-incredibly-valuable company F woud avoid becoming a publicly traded company entirely. Facebook, which the author cites because it's headline-grabbing, harms rather than helps his case: they've intentionally avoided going public until now, and could into the arbitrary future if it were especially onerous for the founders/investors for the company to do so. The rational expectation of Facebook principals right now is that the benefits of going public (at least for the founders and investors) outweigh the negatives, because there is a massive liquidity and valuation improvement from doing so.
But under the author's proposal, that cost/benefit analysis would change, and companies would simply stay private and achieve liquidity for founders and investors via other mechanisms. Over time, these mechanisms would evolve into processes that were as close to indistinguishable from public company registration as possible without actually triggering the language of the market-to-market tax law. SEC rules about selling shares to non-qualified investors would still hold, obviously, but I'm sure with so much potential tax to be saved, investors would find ways to legally aggregate non-qualified investors into qualified vehicles to get around this. Or just live with qualified investors, and no others, owning their companies.