One helpful thing about the extreme left is that it actually announces its goals publicly in advance. The latest example is a piece in the Nation, "The Case for Capping Wealth at $10 Million," by Ingrid Robeyns, who is a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands: "there should be an upper limit to how much personal wealth any individual can have. And that limit does not lie at a billion: Instead, we should look more in the range of $10 million as a hard cap on personal wealth."
The article is refreshingly, or breathtakingly, candid about goals: "there should be a global push to take all the surplus money that the richest do not need." Give credit for using the word "take" rather than some euphemism like "tax."
More: "raising taxes will not be enough...We must also transform the economic system (including the fiscal system) to make it impossible for anyone to become too rich."
It's all so misguided that it's hard to know where to begin in rebutting these claims (other than with the assumption of property rights that is embedded in the biblical commandments against theft and envy, or with the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment). But imagine how difficult it would be to start a new company that makes or does something useful if the moment an entrepreneur's stake in it reached a value of $10 million, any "surplus" value above that level were immediately confiscated. Apple, Amazon, Moderna, Tesla—you could forget about all of them. An economic system that prevents wealth creation is one that also constrains value creation of the sort that benefits customers, employees, and vendors. It also empowers government, taking power out of the private hands that check tyranny and instead giving more power to government officials.
It's tempting to dismiss these views as so extreme as to be irrelevant, but a lot of ideas begin that way and spread if they are unchallenged. When the left says it wants "$10 million as a hard cap on personal wealth," believe them. The word "hard" means the use of force—police with guns, or mobs with pitchforks—to take property away from people who own it.
