What if there was one simple trick to solving the extreme problem of wealth inequality?

There is. A wealth tax.

Unfortunately, for Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty’s, the radical idea of taxing the ultra-rich is a joke, a form of “pseudo-radicalism”.

In his article “What does the left want? A wealth tax. What will that accomplish? Very little“, Chakrabortty looked at a 1 percent levy on billionaires and said taxing the ultra-rich “isn’t a policy, it’s a pantomime.”

Let’s be absolutely clear. The central bad-faith argument of that critique is that the wealth tax is purely a fiscal exercise to raise revenue.

The argument goes: “A wealth tax only raises £10 billion, and you can get that by tweaking the tax on well-to-do families across the country who bought their house in the 1990s, so what’s the point?”

Here’s the point. The wealth tax is a political act that challenges the dominant power and privilege of the plutonomy. Wealth taxes are not about raising revenue for a national government that can print its own money within inflation limits.

Wealth taxes are about two things: power and control of the real resources in our society and economy.

When a handful of oligarchs control more wealth than the bottom half of the country we’re no longer living in a democracy. We’re in a plutocracy.

The assets owned by the plutocrats translate directly into media ownership, industrial ownership, think-tank patronage, financial and debt power, and a permanent, five-star lobbying presence in every capital city.

We have a system that purports to be democratic, but actually the private interests of literally a few thousand billionaires are structurally mandated to override the public needs of the many.

Our society and economy is biased towards the interests of the investor class because of their structural power over investment and employment. A handful of billionaires controlling vast swathes of national assets is demonstrably an existential threat to democracy.

The wealth tax is the political wedge.

It is the sharp, highly visible tool that enables the populace to exercise democratic rights to limit the limitless accumulation of power.

Chakrabortty’s ultimate, most frustrating and bad-faith point is that the left should focus on “deep-rooted changes to give more people a fairer share,” like stronger union organisation and corporate reform.

YES. That’s the whole point! And this is where Chakrabortty’s article collapses under the weight of what Emmett Rensin called “smug liberalism“: a “condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason”.

Chakrabortty has adopted this smug tone, saying, a wealth tax is a “muddle”, “simple and shoddy” and “smacks of dishonesty”. As though the advocates of wealth taxes don’t also demand wholesale structural changes to our rigged tax system and labour laws!

Of course we need a tax system that hasn’t been written primarily to enrich the ultra-wealthy, like inheritance taxes and a broad land tax to deal with the existing stock of power and the concentration of unearned wealth.

Of course we need structural reforms that prevent the concentration of wealth, like labour laws to enable bigger, stronger more powerful unions. We need genuine workplace democracy, like cooperatives, workers councils and mandated worker seats on company boards. We need to shift the balance of power in the workplace and in the market so that wages capture more of the value created, not just corporate profit.

Of course we need the public debate and economic policy focus to shift away from GDP growth and instead look at the distribution of real resources and power. We need the debate focused on the fundamental question of social relations, the excessive and extreme power of billionaires, oligarchs and the multinational corporations that hoard the world’s resources.

And we need to take the plutocrat’s private jet fuel away (through things like a wealth tax) so they can’t fly as fast to crush our political power, while we’re building a stronger unionised workforce on the ground.

A wealth tax is not a pantomime. It’s a vital political organising tool that shows we refuse to just tinker around the edges of a declining, oligarch-controlled economy. A wealth tax is a necessary political step to break through the one-dimensional political consensus that accepts neoliberal growth and exorbitant wealth accumulation as the only social and economic model.

It is a clear line in the sand. A declaration that the argument is about the distribution of resources, wealth and power. A clear battle-line between the people and the plutocrats.

We need it all. The smug centrist trick is to pre-emptively discredit any move towards structural change, to sneer and condescend you into settling for nothing.