The Technocratic argument for taxation has never been primarily moral. It is an argument about function. A governing class that extracts resources from a productive economy without returning value is a structural inefficiency that compounds over time. The postwar consensus justified tolerating extreme wealth concentration on the premise that wealthy individuals created employment and paid taxes that funded public infrastructure. This premise never described reality in any economy. Offshoring, tax havens, and financialization have allowed personal enrichment and impunity from the mechanisms that limit the wealth and power of the ruling class.

France’s wealth tax and the subsequent departure of Gerard Depardieu and others provides a case study in wealth flight as a political gesture. The Scandinavian experience with high taxation producing functional rather than collapsed economies complicates the flight narrative significantly. The question is not whether some wealthy individuals emigrate under high taxation but whether their departure is the desired effect of government policy.

A Technocratic state interested in optimal resource allocation has no obligation to harbor elites that produce nothing for the population they extract from. Simply expatriating (removing citizenship) of these individuals is a simple solution and follows the logic of class struggle to its ultimate nonviolent conclusion. In countries like America, this could be done through legal penalties for lobbying and corruption which can be charged as treason.

The elites are not a natural feature of advanced economies. They are a policy failure that Technocratic governance can correct through the same mechanisms any state uses to remove actors that undermine collective function. High taxation removes the incentive to extract without contributing. Expatriation removes the extractor entirely. Treason charges for corruption and lobbying remove the legal fiction that purchasing political outcomes is a protected activity. None of these are radical proposals. They are the logical endpoints of taking resource allocation seriously as a governing principle rather than a moral aspiration. A Technate has no need for a privileged upper class and should treat them accordingly.