I’m not sure how many of us saw the recent exchange between the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and former US president and current presidential candidate, Donald Trump, on X. For me, this confrontation highlighted a crucial point: extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of a few is always problematic. Whether it’s an oligarch, a tech billionaire, a real estate mogul, an oil sheik or someone with old money, it inevitably leads to corruption. Every single time.
It often starts innocently enough, perhaps with a stroke of luck: inherited wealth or spotting a lucrative market opportunity. Of course, you also need some skill and savvy, but I know plenty of highly intelligent people who are making do with a normal salary and cannot play nice with a billion or two or three. In the Netherlands, we are only talking about 12 people, worldwide about 3000 people who together have 13% of world GDP. Back in 1993, this figure was only 3%. This very small group continues to amass more wealth and more power.
A major issue with money and power is that people come to see it as a personal achievement, a belief that only holds in a neoliberal paradise. In reality, extreme wealth is never solely the result of personal achievement. It relies heavily on the contributions of education, infrastructure, energy supply and healthcare. When individuals start to believe that their wealth makes them superior in every way, they become eager to project that superiority on others – a classic case of Messiah syndrome. In its mild form, it is a philanthropy disorder. In more extreme cases, where the wealth is used to fund and manipulate media, it poses a serious threat to democracy. I’m back to Musk again.
People who already possess significant wealth often only seek to accumulate more, and that is where problems arise. Wealth translates into power – the power to influence tax policies, for example. In many countries, the ultra-wealthy pay minimal taxes, and the Netherlands is a prime example. The richest individuals often pay a lower percentage in taxes compared to teachers or healthcare workers.
And if the discussion threatens to move even slightly in the direction of higher taxes for the extremely rich, the anti-tax lobby quickly mobilises, both overtly and behind the scenes. In the Netherlands, this lobby often argues that the country is already quite equitable. They exploit the fact that many Dutch people struggle to differentiate between income and wealth, as recent research shows. If the conversation gets twisted to focus on taxing pension assets or the average Dutch homeowner’s property, support for taxing extreme wealth rapidly dwindles. At the last G20 summit, economistGabriel Zucman’s proposal to impose a 2% tax on the wealth of the ultra-rich was discussed. Personally, I believe 2% is still way too modest. Such wealth is simply morally indefensible and inherently corrupting. A more sensible approach would be to implement a democratic cap on personal wealth, as advocated by philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns through her concept of limitarianism. Let’s start with 1 billion euros this year. Seems fair, right? We’ll assess next year.
As my mother used to say, “Too much of anything is never good, except contentment.” To achieve that, we need fewer people with extreme wealth.