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  1. What is a wealth cap?
    A wealth cap is a block or ceiling on the amount of personal wealth that an individual can accumulate after subtracting the costs.  It includes income, property, assets, savings and investments.
     
  2. What is wealth “accumulation”?
    Accumulation is the amassing or hoarding of more wealth or more property than what one  needs. It leads to class differences or the creation of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
     
  3. What are considered to be the minimum requirements of a person?
    Food, clothing, medical care, education and shelter are the minimum requirements that should be guaranteed to all.

  1. How is wealth to be measured?

    The value of wealth is to be measured in terms of its capacity to purchase commodities. That is, the purchasing capacity of wealth is its real value. This real value of wealth has not yet been properly understood in numerical terms by economists. 

  2. Should there be a limit on the amount of property that an individual can own?

    Yes, the amount of property that an individual owns in relationship to those who are homeless or without land is a factor to consider in the determination of a wealth cap. 

  3. Who would determine a wealth cap?
    A government-approved economic board made up of industry experts from all relevant levels and trusted for their honesty and integrity would determine an appropriate wealth cap.  

  4. Can a wealth cap be continually adjusted?

    A wealth cap, which influences the standards for people’s minimum requirements for life, can be adjusted with approval based on the idea that the gap between the rich and the poor will reduce over time and minimum standards would improve rather than deteriorate.
     

  5. How can a wealth cap help people who do not have jobs or can no longer work?
     While the government must support job creation and the purchasing capacity of its citizens to acquire a living income, those who cannot work or are unemployed should receive welfare payments that also meet their basic requirements. The standards for the minimum necessities of life should also rise progressively for welfare recipients. At the other end of the spectrum the wealth cap aims to reduce the gap between the lowest income recipient and the highest income recipient. 
     

  6. How can wealth caps be implemented?

    Governments would pass legislation that sets the terms for economic boards and regulatory bodies to determine wealth caps. Proposals for a wealth cap would be supported by academic research to influence social and economic policy, backed up by public debate and sentiment for the idea. Civil disobedience, which can lead to the wanton destruction of public and private property or lose sight of human values, is better replaced by circumstantial pressure.

  1. Does a wealth cap advocate for minimum-maximum wage caps?
    Certainly, the idea of a wealth cap would include the idea of minimum and maximum wage caps.  A minimum wage cap is intended to ensure an employer does not exploit an employee’s labour in relation to business earnings. It sets a minimum standard to cover the costs of living for an individual or family. A maximum wage cap sets the maximum income a person can receive in relation to other employees in the industry as well as society at large. 
     
  2. Does the wealth cap proposal address wealth inequality or income inequality?
    It addresses both. 
     
  3. What would be considered excessive wealth?
    In relation to those who live in extreme poverty or on extremely low incomes, those who are trillionaires, billionaires and multi-millionaires would definitely be considered to have excessive wealth at this point in history. 
     
  4. Is it ever possible to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor to zero?
    The belief that a time will be come when the gap between the rich and the poor will be zero is an idealistic idea because there will always be some people who need or merit having more.  However, it is certainly possible to reduce the current gap which is thousands of times greater between the lowest income and highest income earners to an acceptable and dynamically-healthy equilibrium in the economy. The difference between minimum requirements and special requirements will be minimised. The upliftment of standards for people at the lowermost rung of the social ladder marks the stage of a society’s “progress”.  The focus is to minimise the gap by raising the standard of the low-paid workers and welfare recipients. A gap will always remain however between the highest and lowest as the mark of recognition of merit. 
     
  5. When freedom is such an important value in society, how is it possible to satisfy this human need and right?
    Freedom is unlimited on the intellectual, emotional, creative, intuitive and spiritual levels but the economic freedom of access to physical resources must be considered in relation to the needs of all. Hence the issue of limited physical resources, which is considered to be collective wealth,  necessitates a system of fair and equitable distribution. 
     
  6. What is the relationship between wealth and production?
     Wealth is more efficiently distributed when production is based on consumption rather than profit, thus avoiding the hoarding of wealth by individual owners, manipulation of supply, black marketing, monopoly, adulteration, tax evasion and other malpractices. 
     
  7. Does a wealth cap go against the value of economic freedom?
    The wealth cap acknowledges that there are limited physical resources in the world and therefore a system of sharing is necessary. It goes against unlimited economic freedom by an individual if that freedom detrimentally curtails the rights of others, including non-human species and the environment. 
     
  8. What could be the exponential effects of wealth caps in each country?
    As society achieves the goal of guaranteeing minimum necessities to all its global citizens through wealth caps and other forms of economic restructuring, there could be an exponential increase in wealth. This would occur through the rolling of money,  the returns achieved in harnessing the untapped genius and potential of millions of people who are currently unable to access education and through improved health outcomes all-round by the availability of food, clothing, medical attention and proper accommodation.  In addition, the freeing up of people from struggling for their survival on a physical level would allow human society's creative, intuitive and spiritual potential to flourish. 
     
  9. Should government spend for production or consumption?
    Government expenditure should concentrate on production, rather than consumption, in order to increase the collective wealth. 
     
  10. Given the problems of tax evasion, tax havens and so on, how is it possible to enforce wealth cap regulations?
    Many modern societies have created attractive humanitarian laws gained from popular social movements but a lot of them have not been implemented thoroughly.  Therefore, in the implementation of a wealth cap, the method of ensuring the regulations are followed is an important topic of discussion. 
     
  11. What is the most important factor in the economic structure which can guarantee the all-round physical well-being of people?
    In the economic structure of the society, the purchasing power of people plays the most important role in their physical welfare. 
     
  12. What is better, an increase in per capita income or an increase in purchasing capacity?
    Increases in per capita income are not a sufficiently-reliable and scientific index to determine the standard and progress of a particular economy. Rather, this approach is misleading  because it refers to a simple mathematical calculation of total national income divided by the total population. This does not give the correct picture of the standard of living of the people as the wealth disparity in society is concealed. Per capita income shows the mean and not the variation of the income distribution. If inflation is also considered, the reliability of per capita income is further reduced.

    Purchasing capacity, on the other hand, is the real index of how peopleʼs economic needs can be met by their income. Per capita income is not a proper indication of the increase in the standard of living of people because while people may have very high incomes they may not be able to purchase the necessities of life. If the per capita income is low and people have great purchasing capacity they are much better off. So, purchasing capacity and not per capita income is the true measure of economic prosperity.
     

  13.   What would be considered economic progress in relation to a wealth cap proposal?
    The upliftment of standards for people at the lowermost rung of the social ladder marks the stage of society’s progress, not vice versa. The focus is to minimise the gap by raising the standard of low-paid workers and welfare recipients. A gap will always remain however between the highest and lowest recipients as a mark of recognition of merit.
     

  14. Are there similar proposals of maximum wage caps or wealth caps in history?
    There are a few examples of proposals but they have never been taken up seriously for lack of media attention, business investment, academic research, government incentive or social movement. 
     

  15. Do wealth cap proposals target wealthy individuals?
    Wealth caps are a direct measure to correct an economic loophole that allows individuals to profit excessively and widen the gap between the rich and the poor.  It would lessen the continuing and future creation of wealthy individual elites in society. Dealing with the current generation of wealth-hoarding individuals is a separate, though related issue. 
     

  16. Does a wealth cap proposal apply to businesses?
    A wealth cap targets the personal accumulation of wealth outside the boundaries of social approval in relation to others’ standards of living and access to the basic necessities of life. It does not prevent the creation of wealth by business but advocates for a fairer distribution of profits through minimum/maximum wage caps and a wealth cap on the individual accumulation of those profits.
  1. Why is it necessary to implement a wealth cap?
    Physical wealth is limited but human desire is unlimited. The monitoring and control over physical wealth by society is necessary to prevent exploitation by a few.
     
  2. What is the importance of the wealth cap idea?
    It recognizes that physical resources are limited and therefore there must be a limitation of freedom on the physical level for the sake of the well-being of all. It approves of the socialisation of wealth.
     
  3. What is the most important factor in solving the problem of increasing social inequity?
    Society needs to ensure the movement of money does not become restricted or immobile in the hands of a few because concentration of wealth or blockages in the circulation of money leads to economic depressions.
     
  4. What are the two main causes of economic depressions?

    a) Concentration of wealth
    b) Blockages in the rolling of money
     

  5. Why is it important to circulate money or “keep money rolling”?
    The value of money increases with its mobility. That is, the more that money changes hands, the greater its economic value. On the other hand, the more that money is kept immobile in a safe, the more it loses its utility, and thus its economic value decreases.