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I'm sorry, how is capital gains tax different from "seizing of assets from wealthy people" again? It seems like a distinction without a difference.

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The government ends up with cash, not a pile of Microsoft stock, which is the situation the OP was advocating against. The difference is the government doesn't have to sell off and devalue the stock to extract the value from it.

Yes, technically the government is inserting itself into the transaction and seizing some of the value. But that's what all taxes do.

The government is also the party that is responsible for enforcing the terms of the transaction (via the justice system) if one party where to try to defraud the other. In effect it's more like a transaction fee.

Eliminating the favorable taxation of capital income compared to labor (and most other) income is eliminating a feature of the status quo tax system, which amounts to major capitalists seizing wealth from everybody else.

^This. It's easy to see this when you look at the numbers that show productivity rising while lower income wages stagnate. Higher income earnings have gone up an extreme amount. We've built a society where gains in productivity are not shared and that's not an accident.

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