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Where have we heard that trope before? That everyone's lives are Improved when entrepreneurs are in control?

We saw it when we looked at global poverty statistics, which showed us that, in reality, living standards for the most vulnerable have only improved a little, while for the very richest they have improved a lot. The people at Davos, and at the WEF, are the same people who keep insist ing that we consider the question of whether everyone is better off than they were before, instead of asking: why were the gains from globalization distributed so unequally, and who got to decide? This is a question they conspicuously avoid. The WEF website allows interested readers to consult essays on a range of topics that the work of the organization seeks to address, but economic inequality is not one of them. Inequality is simply not an important issue in the minds of members of the WEF.

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (29%)

But all extreme wealth raises questions about the harm that has been done as it has accumulated, the operation of accountants in the twilight zone of legality, and indeed, the unfair shift-ing of the boundaries between what is legal and what is illegal.

This last point brings us to the next major problem with extreme wealth: it not only provides greatly improved maneuverability within ex isting legislation but also allows for greater influence on future norms and rules. In other words, extreme wealth corrodes democracy.

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (23%)

When I interviewed Marlene Engelhorn, the Austrian-German heiress and co-founder of taxmenow, she likewise stressed that we should ques-tion which groups a state's bureaucracy devotes its attention to. "We should look very carefully at all the bureaucratic energy that currently is focused on people that in a welfare state rightfully get their transfers, like unemployment benefits." She stressed that we often refer to these as donations from the state, overlooking the fact that they are part of social security systems to which we all contribute. Yet what questions do we ask about the rich? "All this bureaucratic energy of finding out everything about poor people should be re-concentrated on wealthy people, be-cause they are the ones who are the actual beneficiaries of societies, but they don't want to share. And it makes absolutely no sense," Engelhorn observed. What is worse, in countries across the world, we find that welfare fraud is just a tiny fraction of total tax fraud. For example, in Austria welfare fraud was estimated in 2022 to amount to €14 million, compared with €12-15 billion for tax fraud, and yet, as Engelhorn points out, we focus much more on the former than the latter.

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (22%)

While there are millionaires on all continents, then, the global spread of the superrich is wildly unequal. Extreme wealth concentration is a particular issue in the USA, which has about 4.25 percent of the world population, but 53 percent of the number of people with wealth of over $50 million.

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (11%)

At what level should the higher, political limit be set? Some people say that every billionaire represents a policy failure, and so they would put the threshold at a billion. There's a joke circulating on social media that anyone who becomes a billionaire should be given a trophy congratu lating them for having "won capitalism." They should have a dog park named after them, and any additional wealth should be confiscated.

The joke is funny-but a billion is way too much. To calculate the political limit, we must start by thinking about the context in which it will be implemented (we'll cover this in more detail in the next chapter). In a country with a socio-economic profile similar to the Netherlands, where I live, we should aim to create a society in which no one has more than €10 million. There shouldn't be any decamillionaires. This figure, whether in euros or dollars or pounds, roughly holds for most developed economies...

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (3%)

If you want no one to remain in poverty and think too much inequality is a bad thing, then it follows that there must be a limit to how much a person can have.

— Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns (2%)