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PORTSIDE CULTURE

LIMITARIANISM: THE CASE AGAINST EXTREME WEALTH  
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David Rosen
March 4, 2024
New York Journal of Books
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_ This study, writes reviewer Rosen, "assesses the growing gap
between that super-rich millionaires and billionaires and
ever-increasing number ordinary people who populate the planet." _

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Limitarianism
The Case Against Extreme Wealth
Ingrid Robeyns
Astra House
ISBN: 9781662601842

When is enough _enough_? This is the question at the heart of Ingrid
Robeyns’ thoughtful study, _Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme
Wealth_. Robeyns, a professor of philosophy and economics at the
University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, assesses the growing gap
between that super-rich millionaires and billionaires and
ever-increasing number ordinary people who populate the planet.

Robeyns’s book asks the all-important question: “How much is too
much?” She argues that ever-increasing inequality poses moral,
political, economic, social, environmental, and psychological problems
that are harmful to the vast majority of people across the globe. 
_Oxfam’s Inequality Inc_ reports that _s_ince 2020,_ _“60% of
humanity has grown poorer, [while] billionaires are now $3.3tn or 34%
richer than they were at the beginning of this decade of crisis.”  

The wealth of the world’s five richest men has more than doubled in
that period, adding an unprecedented $464 billion to their fortunes.
Nine of the world’s top 15 billionaires are US citizens. For the
super-rich like Elon Musk—with personal wealth estimated at $210
billion— there may never be enough. But what about the rest of us?

The book provides invaluable information as to how the financial game
is rigged, including political influence, inheritance laws, tax
schemes, self-serving philanthropies, and visa scams. These schemes
are essential in perpetuating and increasing the wealth of the
super-rich.

“There is real value to everybody having some wealth,” Robeyns
insists. But she warns, “The problem is, as it happens now, it’s
so hugely unequal. The vast majority of people get almost nothing.”
Suggesting the Netherlands as a model of limitarianism, she states:
“In a country with a socioeconomic profile similar to the
Netherlands, where I live, we should aim to create a society in which
no one has more than €10m. There shouldn’t be any
decamillionaires.”

She offers a moral argument about today’s wealth divide and only
sketches out how limitarianism might work in practice. She suggests
three broad strategies: (i) “structural action,” i.e.,
guaranteeing equal opportunities, a guaranteed minimum wage; (ii)
“fiscal action,” i.e., imposing caps on extreme wealth; and (iii)
“critical action,” i.e., encouraging the super-rich to give away
their wealth.

Robeyns argues that a radical reform of taxation to concentrate on
wealth rather than income is necessary. She points that inheritance is
the ultimate non-meritocratic advantage, and has to be largely a
collective, not a familial benefit. She also reminds readers that
individuals like entertainment heiress Abigail Disney, Mackenzie Scott
(ex-wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), and Irish American billionaire
Chuck Feeney (airport duty-free shops) have given away much of their
individual fortunes.

Robeyns offers carefully researched discussions of the wealth gaps in
the US and the UK.  However, she offers very little historical
discussion of just how long debate about the wealth gap has gone on,
especially in the US. For example, J.P. Morgan, a Gilded Age
plutocrat, said executives should earn no more than 20 times the pay
of the lowest paid worker. A half-century later, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt argued that “No American citizen ought to have a net
income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year
[i.e., $1 million in 2024 terms];” he even proposed a 100 percent
tax rate on all incomes over $25,000. And in 1973, the economist John
Kenneth Galbraith argued, “The most forthright and effective way of
enhancing equality within the firm would be to specify the maximum
range between average and maximum compensation.”

_Limitarianism_ doesn’t seriously address the great political
challenge that defines the deepening wealth-gap crisis gripping the
world. Will the super-rich give up the wealth unless they were forced
to? This is most clearly expressed in the author’s repeated effort
to separate her analysis for “communism,” especially
“USSR-communism.” “The claim that limitarianism is essentially
communism . . . is at once hilarious and deeply sad,” she writes.
Going further, she adds: “communism is an economic system with
political implications, whereas limitarianism is a moral principle . .
.” 

Robeyns’ analysis would have been strengthened had she recalled that
the old Russia was dominated by a super-rich aristocracy in many ways
not unlike many “first world” countries today and that the USSR
emerged from a failed political act of revolution, an effort to
overcome the tyranny of the super-rich.

Today, capitalism is in crisis as it undergoes an historical
realignment that the political theorist John Mearsheimer calls the
shift from a “uniglobal” order (i.e., with the US as the dominant
player) to a “multiglobal” order (with the US augmented by China
and Europe). One way this reordering is expressed is the ever-greater
wealth of the super-wealthy and deepening inequality experienced by
everyone else.   

Robeyns’ well-meaning study provides a small light in a dark time,
one can only hope that the super-rich and those in political power not
only hear what she has to say but embrace it.

David Rosen's most recent book is _Sex, Sin & Subversion: The
Transformation of 1950s New York's Forbidden into America's New
Normal_. His writing critically explores American History, public
policy, media technology and sexuality. His articles and book reviews
have appeared in such diverse venues as Salon, _Black Star News_,
_Brooklyn Rails_, Huffington Post, CounterPunch, _Sexuality and
Culture_, _The_ _Hollywood Reporter_, and others.

* wealth inequality
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* capitalism
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* wealth tax
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* the super rich
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