Nobody who held this opinion was ever able to even give me a rough idea of an explanation how it should supposedly damage the economy.
Because if you tax the rich, they move away! And that’s clearly bad because…
They take their wealth with them! Just think of all the jewellery that will hang of people’s necks in other countries and all the overpriced art that was never publicly displayed, now not visible elsewhere.
And of course they’ll take all the housing and factories and the land they’re built on, stuff it all in their pockets and fly away with it.
Just think of all the jobs. Not the jobs, companies are already offshoring now, of course.
And ignore that companies make such decisions based on productivity, available infrastructure and supply chain networks.
No, they’ll move to less profitable countries because clearly not paying taxes is more important to rich people than making more money.
And of course, we can’t tax people when they move away, so we shouldn’t tax them to avoid this.
We do see this in reality sometimes.
When a company leaves, they usually still own the buildings (assuming they didn’t just lease them). Typically they would try to sell them off. It’s not unheard of that a similar company picks up the location and hires back some of the staff.
Think of one supermarket closing shop only for another to open in the same location.
What happens if a company does not sell depends on the country.
When companies left Russia, several stores were continued under new management and afaik some businesses were not sold off but seized. Whether the owners were reimbursed for that seizure I do not know.
All that said, I want to repeat that businesses leave countries usually due to lack of profitability. It has no (rational) link to a personal wealth tax.