I agree that Solana's proposal is just kitschful thinking and likely to fail. You also put your finger on important trends amplifying America's long-standing egalitarian fervor, and you're probably right about how to counteract its excesses.
But I don't think any story about populist resentment is complete without considering social media. Newspapers, radio and television brought us closer to the glamorous, the powerful, and the fabulously wealthy. But social media pushes the illusion even further, promoting the feeling that we are their peers in every respect and causing some to believe they're part of the same Dunbar group. As de Tocqueville wrote in 1835:
>When all conditions are unequal, there is no inequality great enough to offend the eye, whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete. It is therefore natural that the love of equality grows constantly with equality itself; in satisfying it, one develops it.
That's true whether the equality of conditions is real or imaginary. When social media closes the perceived distance between us and the billionaires, it feeds the appetite for more.
More than that, social media breaks the illusion that the rich and powerful are somehow so much more brilliant or harder working than ordinary people. It’s hard to view these billionaires as superior when, for example, you see that they are also slinging mediocre takes on Twitter in the middle of the day instead of working. Or you see them on long form podcasts and their worldviews are strange and often incoherent, or just carbon copies of stuff you see from twitter anons.
I think most of them are exceptionally smart and hard-working, but they might as well be lazy idiots if they're going to be impulsive, unwise, or indulge in other all-too-human weaknesses online.
The converse is also true: there really is a lot of talent spread out across the world that's invisible and inaccessible, for path-dependent reasons.
Sometimes social media gives those people the tools they need to break through to larger audiences or have a bigger impact. Unfortunately, there are also way more people who incorrectly think they deserve an audience or influence commensurate with talent they don't possess.
Cultural Marxists annihilates aristocratic and hierarchic thought in Western Academia, then the Western elite forget how to do pursue culture, then justifying annihilation by the same Marxists.
Sandal also raised a related point in "Tyranny of Merit": that in a meritocracy, the wealthy, successful, and rich lose any obligation or understanding of their accomplishments as partially flowing from public goods. The notion that everyone's deserts are exclusively due to their own merits breeds arrogance in the successful, and the absence of any value besides success creates a sense of humiliation in the economically immobile. Sandal also does a wonderful job pointing out how Obama's moralizing language of merit - around going to college, around doing the "smart" thing - helped create the very conditions for Trump.
Building wealth in a free economy requires great moral virtue.
Failing to realize this animates everyone from nihilistic leftists who hate achievement to those who nominally support capitalism yet claim that successful industrialists owe "society" more than the products and jobs they created. I don't want people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk wasting their precious time trying to emulate Locke and Jefferson. But it is the modern heirs of the latter who have failed us all by refusing to acknowledge the ethical rectitude of the capitalist system and those who succeed within it.
I think there are still plenty of billionaire's who are working from the perspective of giving back to society. The Gates foundation is obvious, but also Musk and Thiel are both trying to save the world in their own deranged way. The mob demands their surrender, rather than their moral rectitude, because the mob believes that Democracy is the highest form of moral decision making, no matter how many times that idea is proven wrong.
It is also possible to accumulate large amounts of wealth today in America without creating it. Arguably much of the finance industry consists of profits made on socially useless transactions; for example, it doesn't matter very much if market prices respond to news one millisecond faster or slower, but high frequency trading firms pay lots of money to be able to receive and act on news milliseconds faster than other traders.
Really interesting two essays! But I think you're too accepting of a dismissive casting of a wealth tax. It's as fundamentally human as possible: tit for tat. There are lots of confounders, so it's not really possible to give a tight, confident estimate in the amount, but it is definitely true that the elite have stolen trillions of dollars from the rest of us over the last ~50 years. Both in the UK and the US policy shifted explicitly in a pro-capital, anti-labor direction starting with Thatcher and Reagan. Since then the elite have captured round to 100% of the gains from increased productivity. The median man in the US didn't get an raise in hourly wage for 40+ years (late 1970s to late 2010s). The median woman got a raise only because of gains in rights and respect.
Yes there's globalization and technological change. But it's deeply unserious to claim that the massive upward redistribution over that period isn't meaningfully driven by political and regulatory capture by right wing ideologues/wannabe oligarchs. In other words, the elites not just rhetorically but literally have stolen an ungodly amount from the rest of us. Why shouldn't we take it back? And change the rules to it's not so easy to steal in the first place?
I kind of get your intuition about fairness here and I know we're not going to agree about market economies, but … "stealing"?
Take Amazon, one of those highly productive companies. They have created tens of thousands of very high-paying jobs, well above the median of 40-50 years ago in real terms. Beyond that, they pay their truckers and warehouse employees competitive wages. I don't think Amazon truckers deserve to be paid more than Coca-Cola’s truckers for winning the employer lottery.
Thank you, I was going to say the exact same thing.
"You mean these companies that have created infinite free things that literally 2-3 billion unique people use every month? Google maps, gmail, Tik Tok, Instagram, all free! That's "stealing" now??"
I feel like this exaggerates the impacts of wealth taxes - billionaires would still be billionaires, it just that more of their wealth would be taxed. Its not the french revolution or anything like that
Might it be that it's just incomprehensible to most people why billionaires are so wealthy?
We never teach young people (or anyone, really) how capitalism actually creates progress. I bet for most people, they couldn't remotely explain how, say, economies of scale work to bring down the cost of TVs (Brian Potter had a great essay about that, btw.) If you don't understand how CEOs or founders or technical expert create immense value, and you see them capture immense wealth, then yes, of course, that seems arbitrary and unfair. I mean: non-sense email jobs, figureheads that don't create much and have $50M mansions and $2 yachts really wouldn't be just!
Now, if you've actually worked in the leadership of a productive enterprise and have carefully observed how someone build a scaled business, you *get* how hard it is to build an Amazon or a SpaceX, or heck, even a $100M ed-tech start-up, like Mystery Science where I worked, or a company like Cirrus certifying the first new aircraft in decades, as a startup. These CEOs *earn* their wealth in very specific ways that most of us could never equal--and we all benefit from it.
Except that how this works, and what they (and their productive, often highly-paid employees) do to create value is invisible to 99% of the population.
My call to billionaires wouldn't be to found or fund more media companies, but to enable people to understand how they and their companies actually create value.
I'm reading Brian Potter's excellent book, The Origins of Efficiency. In every chapter, I am struck by the specific, detailed work by uncounted people that went into making things better and cheaper--and by the massive scope of this enterprise that delivered the modern technological world that enables all of us to live with comforts and choices that would have been unimaginable 150 years ago.
I am skeptical of this claim that there was a transition here: In earlier times, power was expected to carry visible obligations — duties of stewardship, patronage, and public virtue.
I am not saying you are wrong. But I would want sort of metric, or at least a lot of anecdotes, that something really has changed here. Are wealthy people today less likely to do philanthropy? Or in what other ways are they not doing something that they used to do?
I think it is more likely that the takeover of academia by far left people has resulted in a lot more propaganda against the wealthy. I could be wrong. I would like a more quantitative look at what has changed.
I agree that Solana's proposal is just kitschful thinking and likely to fail. You also put your finger on important trends amplifying America's long-standing egalitarian fervor, and you're probably right about how to counteract its excesses.
But I don't think any story about populist resentment is complete without considering social media. Newspapers, radio and television brought us closer to the glamorous, the powerful, and the fabulously wealthy. But social media pushes the illusion even further, promoting the feeling that we are their peers in every respect and causing some to believe they're part of the same Dunbar group. As de Tocqueville wrote in 1835:
>When all conditions are unequal, there is no inequality great enough to offend the eye, whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete. It is therefore natural that the love of equality grows constantly with equality itself; in satisfying it, one develops it.
That's true whether the equality of conditions is real or imaginary. When social media closes the perceived distance between us and the billionaires, it feeds the appetite for more.
Yes + the points made by Martin Gurri. You're right social media super important. But I don't feel I have much to add there?
More than that, social media breaks the illusion that the rich and powerful are somehow so much more brilliant or harder working than ordinary people. It’s hard to view these billionaires as superior when, for example, you see that they are also slinging mediocre takes on Twitter in the middle of the day instead of working. Or you see them on long form podcasts and their worldviews are strange and often incoherent, or just carbon copies of stuff you see from twitter anons.
I think most of them are exceptionally smart and hard-working, but they might as well be lazy idiots if they're going to be impulsive, unwise, or indulge in other all-too-human weaknesses online.
The converse is also true: there really is a lot of talent spread out across the world that's invisible and inaccessible, for path-dependent reasons.
Sometimes social media gives those people the tools they need to break through to larger audiences or have a bigger impact. Unfortunately, there are also way more people who incorrectly think they deserve an audience or influence commensurate with talent they don't possess.
Cultural Marxists annihilates aristocratic and hierarchic thought in Western Academia, then the Western elite forget how to do pursue culture, then justifying annihilation by the same Marxists.
An inventive “plan”, if we can call it like this, making evident that Marcuse was right and Marx was wrong
but I'm not "justifying it".
Never thought it about you!
Sandal also raised a related point in "Tyranny of Merit": that in a meritocracy, the wealthy, successful, and rich lose any obligation or understanding of their accomplishments as partially flowing from public goods. The notion that everyone's deserts are exclusively due to their own merits breeds arrogance in the successful, and the absence of any value besides success creates a sense of humiliation in the economically immobile. Sandal also does a wonderful job pointing out how Obama's moralizing language of merit - around going to college, around doing the "smart" thing - helped create the very conditions for Trump.
Building wealth in a free economy requires great moral virtue.
Failing to realize this animates everyone from nihilistic leftists who hate achievement to those who nominally support capitalism yet claim that successful industrialists owe "society" more than the products and jobs they created. I don't want people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk wasting their precious time trying to emulate Locke and Jefferson. But it is the modern heirs of the latter who have failed us all by refusing to acknowledge the ethical rectitude of the capitalist system and those who succeed within it.
I think there are still plenty of billionaire's who are working from the perspective of giving back to society. The Gates foundation is obvious, but also Musk and Thiel are both trying to save the world in their own deranged way. The mob demands their surrender, rather than their moral rectitude, because the mob believes that Democracy is the highest form of moral decision making, no matter how many times that idea is proven wrong.
It is also possible to accumulate large amounts of wealth today in America without creating it. Arguably much of the finance industry consists of profits made on socially useless transactions; for example, it doesn't matter very much if market prices respond to news one millisecond faster or slower, but high frequency trading firms pay lots of money to be able to receive and act on news milliseconds faster than other traders.
The kitsch part was really good. Didn’t want to name University of Austin? 😉
Really interesting two essays! But I think you're too accepting of a dismissive casting of a wealth tax. It's as fundamentally human as possible: tit for tat. There are lots of confounders, so it's not really possible to give a tight, confident estimate in the amount, but it is definitely true that the elite have stolen trillions of dollars from the rest of us over the last ~50 years. Both in the UK and the US policy shifted explicitly in a pro-capital, anti-labor direction starting with Thatcher and Reagan. Since then the elite have captured round to 100% of the gains from increased productivity. The median man in the US didn't get an raise in hourly wage for 40+ years (late 1970s to late 2010s). The median woman got a raise only because of gains in rights and respect.
Yes there's globalization and technological change. But it's deeply unserious to claim that the massive upward redistribution over that period isn't meaningfully driven by political and regulatory capture by right wing ideologues/wannabe oligarchs. In other words, the elites not just rhetorically but literally have stolen an ungodly amount from the rest of us. Why shouldn't we take it back? And change the rules to it's not so easy to steal in the first place?
I kind of get your intuition about fairness here and I know we're not going to agree about market economies, but … "stealing"?
Take Amazon, one of those highly productive companies. They have created tens of thousands of very high-paying jobs, well above the median of 40-50 years ago in real terms. Beyond that, they pay their truckers and warehouse employees competitive wages. I don't think Amazon truckers deserve to be paid more than Coca-Cola’s truckers for winning the employer lottery.
Thank you, I was going to say the exact same thing.
"You mean these companies that have created infinite free things that literally 2-3 billion unique people use every month? Google maps, gmail, Tik Tok, Instagram, all free! That's "stealing" now??"
What do you think about UATX?
I feel like this exaggerates the impacts of wealth taxes - billionaires would still be billionaires, it just that more of their wealth would be taxed. Its not the french revolution or anything like that
Might it be that it's just incomprehensible to most people why billionaires are so wealthy?
We never teach young people (or anyone, really) how capitalism actually creates progress. I bet for most people, they couldn't remotely explain how, say, economies of scale work to bring down the cost of TVs (Brian Potter had a great essay about that, btw.) If you don't understand how CEOs or founders or technical expert create immense value, and you see them capture immense wealth, then yes, of course, that seems arbitrary and unfair. I mean: non-sense email jobs, figureheads that don't create much and have $50M mansions and $2 yachts really wouldn't be just!
Now, if you've actually worked in the leadership of a productive enterprise and have carefully observed how someone build a scaled business, you *get* how hard it is to build an Amazon or a SpaceX, or heck, even a $100M ed-tech start-up, like Mystery Science where I worked, or a company like Cirrus certifying the first new aircraft in decades, as a startup. These CEOs *earn* their wealth in very specific ways that most of us could never equal--and we all benefit from it.
Except that how this works, and what they (and their productive, often highly-paid employees) do to create value is invisible to 99% of the population.
My call to billionaires wouldn't be to found or fund more media companies, but to enable people to understand how they and their companies actually create value.
I'm reading Brian Potter's excellent book, The Origins of Efficiency. In every chapter, I am struck by the specific, detailed work by uncounted people that went into making things better and cheaper--and by the massive scope of this enterprise that delivered the modern technological world that enables all of us to live with comforts and choices that would have been unimaginable 150 years ago.
I am skeptical of this claim that there was a transition here: In earlier times, power was expected to carry visible obligations — duties of stewardship, patronage, and public virtue.
I am not saying you are wrong. But I would want sort of metric, or at least a lot of anecdotes, that something really has changed here. Are wealthy people today less likely to do philanthropy? Or in what other ways are they not doing something that they used to do?
I think it is more likely that the takeover of academia by far left people has resulted in a lot more propaganda against the wealthy. I could be wrong. I would like a more quantitative look at what has changed.
Truth and reason for me, but not for thee?
https://brutusmac.substack.com/p/a-wealth-tax-on-billionaires-is-not?r=6aexdu&utm_medium=ios
Wealth=financial assets=debt=the future. Tax wealth and you tax the future. So there it is.
Maybe I am out of the loop, what is UATX?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin ; see https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688 for more information on its recent history & probable failure.