The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.

The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class warfare.

Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall — that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.

This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism, at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.

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