Confiscate Their Money

One of the privileges of great wealth is the ability to pretend that spending it amounts to a job. For the pharma executives Calvin and Orsula Knowlton, that spare job was the planning and construction of a $27 million New Jersey mansion, complete with an indoor pub and an elevator to the his-and-hers gym and an underground tunnel leading to the planned auto gallery. The religious couple also installed a chapel in the mansion, a home they did not often spend time in, because they had others. How they squared their allegiance to the Bible with their superfluous $27 million palace was not discussed.

For Daren Metropoulos, the 41-year-old son of a private equity titan, the fake job has been a decade spent buying up $326 million of luxury homes, which can be referred to as “assembling a real estate portfolio.” Metropoulos, who has worked only for companies that his dad owns, has bought up the Playboy Mansion and Mandarin Oriental condos in New York and a Martha’s Vineyard compound and waterfront homes in Hawaii and Miami Beach. Most recently, he paid $148 million cash for a Palm Beach estate. These “all will be used as personal residences,” the Wall Street Journal notes. The wealth that Metropoulos will earn on his vast portfolio of mansions is simply proof that in America, hard work pays off.

Of course, even this is child’s play compared to the holdings of a real billionaire. Ken Griffin, for example, the Citadel hedge fund billionaire, has a $122 million pied-a-terre in London, a $238 million apartment in Manhattan, and is currently building himself a $1 billion home in Florida. One cannot expect hardworking men like this to be forced to shelter in the vile confines of a “hotel.”

One of the foundational operating principles of the United States of America is that no one can ever be deemed to have too much wealth. It’s odd, if you think about it. There is no upper limit—a man with more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes can go right on adding billions of dollars to his pile, wealth that could change millions of lives for the better but which means nothing to him other than the movement of a few digits on his acccounts. No law or agency is empowered to say that he has too much. Yet it is certainly possible to have too little wealth. If you have no money, you will be denied housing and you will be denied quality health care and you will be denied food and respect and when you are put in jail you will be denied bail. This seems, by a common sense version of morality, exactly backwards. Our lack of an upper wealth limit is evidence of a land where rich people write the laws.

The United States government should confiscate the wealth of the very rich. Their wealth is symbolically grotesque, unnecessary for them to have, needed more by others, and, most importantly, allowing such wealth to pool into such a small number of hands warps our political system and our society at large in incredibly harmful ways. Rather than populist politicians grumbling about billionaires and railing at the way that they exert undue influence over all of our lives, the government should tax all individual wealth over, let’s say, $999 million at 100%. Democratic governments should not wage PR battles against billionaires. They should eradicate them.

... Yes, I understand the barriers that money in politics and rich donors pose to such a thing happening. But history shows again and again that moral demands that will fix a terrible flaw plaguing all of society can in fact migrate into mainstream politics even if they harm a particular interest group. The first step to achieving this is to begin creating a consensus among normal people that billionaires should not exist. There is a process that all political ideas must go through before they are achieved. Just because there are barriers in the way does not mean that the underlying idea is not just and necessary. This particular idea has the benefit of being both necessary to the survival of a functioning democracy, and almost completely walled off from entry to the Land of Serious Policy Discussion. That means that every intellectual and pundit and activist individual and group who picks up this idea and makes the case for it is building the foundation of its success in a way that will feel really good when it is achieved. (...)

What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them? They can still own multiple mansions and a private jet and buy any material thing they want and leave a fortune behind when they die that will take care of their family for generations. As a practical matter of day to day life, they lose nothing. All they really lose is the ability to unduly influence the rest of us. They lose (some of) their ability to act like gods. 

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Daren Metropoulos/uncredited