The fallacious case for abolishing the rich
Limitarianism. By Ingrid Robeyns. Astra House; 336 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £25 Enough. By Luke Hildyard.
Pluto Press; 160 pages; $19.95 and £14.99 Two new books argue for doing away with the rich. Not in the Pol Pot sense of murdering them all, for the writers—a Dutch professor of ethics and the director of a left-wing British think-tank—are impeccably nice. Rather, they favour policies that would make it impossible to have “too much" money.
How much is too much? Ingrid Robeyns of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the author of “Limitarianism", thinks the state should prevent anyone from accumulating more than $10m (or pounds, or euros; it is a rough figure). In addition to this hard “political limit", she thinks there should be a much lower “ethical limit". In countries where the state pays for health care and pensions, no one should amass more than $1m in savings, and society should scorn anyone who does.
Luke Hildyard, who runs the High Pay Centre in London and whose book is called “Enough", stops short of an “absolute cap" but suggests something close to it. No one should earn more than the current threshold for entering the top 1% of taxpayers, he believes. (In Britain that was over £180,000 a year in 2021-22; in America it was about $330,000 in 2021.) Redistributing additional income or wealth beyond this point, or enacting policies so that such riches never accrue in the first place, “has no real downsides", he claims.
The authors offer many reasons for loathing the loaded. They are bad for the environment, with their private jets and occasional holidays in space. They aggravate housing shortages by owning multiple homes.
Some of them buy political influence. Some acquired their wealth corruptly. A pragmatist
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