What if you couldn't make as much money as there is in the universe, stick it in your ears and pursue your life long dream ("I'd like to order 100 cases of spikes please..."). What a grim grim world that would be. Forever stuck with a limited amount of income, and while you might prove yourself better than other more well endowed men, you could never prove yourselves better than the other man who had reached what you yourselves had reached: Maximum Net Worth. You'd have to use something other than unlimited riches to prove that, if you must.
The idea of a maximum net worth is pure poison to the American mind, but I can speak to it as a rugged individualist. That's right, I'm one of those individualist progressives, the one that accepts that if you can't make an argument that public works are in someones personal best interest, you can't convince them at all. I have such an argument but that's beside the point, the point is I understand why people would say as rugged individuals, "I should be able to shove as much money in my ears as I wants, even if more won't fit".
Individualists need to face facts as I have: we rely on society. We love to deny that, we loath that it's true, but we rely on society. The notion that unlimited property is our right flies in the face of how that property right is maintained, specifically, through taxes.
Your right to have a second home is protected by the fact that the California police will protect your California home even while you are in Florida for the year. But I support that, two homes is no problem, I just want to point out that "having" property is not a whole concept in and of itself, it requires institutions, social institutions... and while it is in society's best interest to allow people to amass wealth, and while I don't believe we will ever all have, or should have, "equal wealth"... I do believe there should be maximums and minimums set and a system built to support those minimums and maximums.
How maximum net worth would work, loosely:
- A maximum net worth, lets say $100,000,000
- Money beyond that would have to be given away, or be confiscated
- People would obviously give it away
- Probably within their family
Why do it at all? Because we have to stop the pattern of the rich getting richer, this is not long term sustainable... if there is some more natural way to ensure that, that would be grand, but there doesn't seem to be. To allow that to continue, when it can't continue forever, is to ask for a crisis, either where the impoverished, having lost all hope, bring chaos or some other serious tumult... revolution.
Better to consciously produce some evolutionary adaptation to avoid the problem, the cycle of crisis which punctuates human history with unnecessary abject misery.
There are a lot of messy details and interesting economic issues, philosophical and practical both, but why, in principle, not have a maximum net worth?
(also at MLW)