The Case for Limiting Wealth (w/ Ingrid Robeyns)

Current Affairs

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Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep everyone else poor, how large concentrations of wealth damage democracy and the environment, and how "limitarian" public policies can become a reality.

"There are many different reasons why you might endorse a limitarian worldview. There is the principled objection against inequality. Or there’s the fact that so much excess wealth is tainted. Society’s richest have appropriated an unfairly large part of the economic gains of the past century, and they need to redistribute that surplus. Or you might support limitarianism because it would do a huge amount to address existing power imbalances and protect political equality—to halt the erosion of democracy, and prevent the domination of politics by the wealthy few. Or it might be the fact that limitarianism can take us a long way toward saving our planet, given that the lifestyles, business strategies, tax avoidance or evasion, and lobbying of the super-rich have led to civilization-threatening ecological harm. A world on fire needs a lot of money to extinguish the flames, and the super-rich are holding on to money they don’t need. It makes much more sense to take the money for dousing the fire from the super-rich than from the middle classes, let alone the poor. The same point also holds for meeting other needs beyond protecting the livability of the planet, such as fighting poverty and other forms of deprivation. Collectively acknowledging that at some point enough is enough would also make the rich themselves better off. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally: no one can claim that they deserve to be a millionaire."

- Ingrid Robeyns