Wealth inequality, as always, is in news again. Some American billionaires did not pay a penny in taxes some years, and some of them have got money to spare to indulge in a private space race – when Covid-19 is pushing 88-115 million people into extreme poverty.
Is that fair? Should there be some limit to the amount of wealth anybody can hoard?
Pure capitalism views billionaires as poster-boys. They show what one can achieve in free markets through sheer hard work, will power, vision or intelligence. That, however, is rarely the case, as the ProPublica report
showed how billionaires exploit loopholes in taxation to make more money that an average citizen can’t. The rich also can afford to lobby for policies and regulations that help them make more money. What is the way out? The attempt so far the world over, allegedly half-hearted, has been to tinker rules and policies apparently to progress towards a bit of equality.
Then there’s another view, which states that every billionaire is a policy failure.
This view ridicules tax tweaks and prefers to go for the extreme – limit wealth, make billionaires impossible. ‘Distributive justice’ focuses instead on meeting minimal needs of people, prioritizing the worst-off and reducing inequalities. In philosophical literature, such a view is called ‘sufficientarianism’, ‘prioritarianism’ and ‘egalitarianism’.
Its latest version is ‘limitarianism’, promoted by philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, director of the Fair Limits Projects [https://fairlimits.nl/] at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She says it is not morally ok to have “more resources than are needed to fully flourish in life.” Limitarianism is less about what is “allowed” and more about what is “enough.” It proposes a ‘wealth line’, like ‘poverty line’: Instead of attempts to save people from going below a certain level of poverty, the suggestion is to make attempts to stop people from going above a certain level of wealth (and that will solve the poverty problem).
The Limitarian debate is not about fixing a certain level of wealth, but about whether the very notion of ‘wealth line’ makes sense. [https://ips-dc.org/concentrated-wealth-limitarian/]
Introductory essay:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/12/is-it-time-limit-personal-wealth/
A foundational paper:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26785948?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Ab4a780c7d6986aaaa164271a2464ee73&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
