Share The Money! Cap Wealth at $10 Million & Distribute the Excess

by Hank Pellissier (BIO HERE)

Hello everyone. I’m going to start by explaining how I developed the global egalitarian point of view that I have.

I was born lucky, from a successful dairy farm family, I was born with a silver cow udder in my mouth. I grew up in a large house on a hill, my college tuition was paid for, I got a trust fund that I squandered, and my great-uncle Larry, a childless alcoholic - died in 1998, before the real estate boom, just in time to leave me and my wife enough money for a down payment on three properties in San Francisco. I can’t complain. Obviously, I am a fortunate person, but …

When I grew up I realized most of my friends weren’t as lucky. They were from Oklahoma and Mexico. Annie was my only neighbor in the farm country, I called her Annie Okie, she didn’t mind, she was a big sister to me, telling me scary stories, but she had to move away from me, her Dad got a job elsewhere. Courtney Casey had a lisp and crooked teeth - no money for braces - but he was huge and brave - he protected me in junior high but after that, he disappeared. Tim Kline lived in a house that had holes in the rotten floor you had to walk around them and his Dad was a moonshiner, he made peach brandy, delicious, Tim relocated when I was fifteen, due to poverty. Pete Reza had 12 brothers and sisters, he got beat up by older boys who bullied him because his sisters were sexy, the bullies said they were putas - Pete joined the army when he was 16 to get away.

My parents were horrified by my friends, they wanted me to have rich buddies I could meet at the country club, but I decided rich people were boring, they had first-world problems that they whined about anyway.

Fast forward 55 years. I run a nonprofit now that tries to alleviate poverty in Africa, India, and Myanmar. What do I believe?

My opinion, backed up by statistics I will inflict on you later, is that there is an abundance of wealth on this planet, a surplus of money, enough to eliminate a huge amount of pain, death and disease, the suffering of starvation, the pain of poverty, social humiliation, and physical immobility, unable to travel outside one’s village for one’s entire life.

From 2003-2008 I was a preschool director. A major task of preschool instructors is teaching toddlers how to share. Share the crayons. Share the Leggos. Don’t eat all the Goldfish by yourself. Take turns talking. It’s Chrissie’s turn now to wear the princess dress. We teach our children how to share when they are young so they can become what we call “socialized,”

But when they are older… we tell them the opposite - we tell our children “socialism” is a horrible idea, we encourage them to capitalize, exploit, hoard, monopolize, hostile take-over. We tell them having-the-most is best, we tell them financial wealth determines our value as a human, we tell them what-you-get is more important than what-you-give and thus, we are now in a world where Jeff Bezos gains $26 million a day, but 4 billion people earn less than $7 a day. Wealthy people in Marin County live an average of 94 years, but in northern Nigeria, poor people average only 49 years. We live in a nation where the bottom 50% of owns only 2.5% of the wealth.

I decided the capitalist system needed to be overthrown, but I didn’t know how to replace it, so I became a nerd reader of egalitarian economic theories, embarking on what can be called radical reading speed dating. My first crush was on Thomas Piketty, the French economist - Pikketism - NO BILLIONAIRES - Massive Universal basic Income. He’s the OG of modern wealth distribution discussion. After that, I had a two-year relationship with Henry George, Georgism, The Single Tax on Land Value, Henry George was a self-taught economist who got his epiphany in San Francisco in the 1870’s watching land speculators grow fortunes while others were homeless and hungry. His book Progress and Poverty sold more copies than anything but the Bible but his ideas were snuffed in the Ivory Tower.

I broke up with Henry George because his algorithm is too complicated for public consumption and I wanted something less centralized so I rebounded in the opposite direction, the anarcho-communism of the rogue Prince Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Kropotkinism. I will always have a flame in my heart for Kropotkin, his trust in the inherent goodness of humanity. I thought I’d stay married to this noble outlaw but we divorced because it turns out I’m attached, like a running dog traditionalist, to the concept of private property.

After Kropotkin I dated Zapatismo for 2-3 weeks, the plans of Emiliano and SubCommandante Marcos, but this ideal was too indigenous and agrarian for me. After that, I had a brief fling with Huey Long - the Kingfish of Louisiana - his Share the Wealth plan was far to the left of FDR’s New Deal. I had an even shorter hookup with Rojava Confederalism; I glanced quickly at Wendell Berry’s Localism, and I barely even flirted with Marxist-Leninism because I think “vanguardism” is patronizing and most of that group turn out to be tankies.

I moved on, until I fell in love with Dorothy Day, the anarchist party girl who became Catholic after birthing her daughter. Dorothy Day’s Distributism concept grabbed my heart - I thought I was at home with her -- but eventually my love faded, I’m ex-agrarian, I left Dorothy and right now I am hot for Limitarianism - the recent Dutch ethical viewpoint designed by professor Ingrid Robeyns at the University of Utrecht who believes no one should have more than $10 million dollars.

I’m happy Ingrid’s last name is Robeyns, because the patron saint of any wealth distributor is Robin Hood, we want to take from the rich and give to the poor. We oppose the billionaires, the oligarchs, who want government ruled by billionaires that serve billionaires with policies that advance their wealth at the expense of others.

Let me explain what California would look like if we adopted Limitarianism, if we capped wealth at $10 million and distributed the surplus for public welfare. If we did this - $4.5 trillion would be gained. Distributing this to the public would deliver a one-time UBI of $115,000 per person, Universal healthcare, Free public education from PreK-PhD, Free Public transit, free child care and eldercare, and, finally, one million affordable homes leading to an improved housing situation with the cost of rent reduced by 66%

Ingrid Robeyns provides six reasons why wealth should be capped at $10 million. I will explain my three favorite.

Her first reason is that excess money doesn’t make deca-millionaires happy anyway. After all your basic needs are met, happiness doesn’t increase. With $10 million dollars you can live in a lavish house, with gourmet food, prepared by servants, and travel all you want. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman researched this topic and determined that approximately $111,000 annually in today’s money produces a contentment, that Does Not increase with greater income. I can vouch on this topic because I traveled in Europe last year with a friend who has $30 million. His wealth stresses him out. “What should I do with it?” He frets all day. He doesn’t want to leave it with his two sons because he thinks, correctly (according to studies) that it won’t be good for them. In Vienna he’d say, “Hank, I’m making $2,300 a day in the stock market. You have to help me spend it! Let’s get up at 7:00 am tomorrow and see these 10 castles and museums on my list.” I’d reply, “sorry, I’m not interested.” “I’ll pay for it!” He’d argue. “Still not interested.” “Okay,” he’d grumble, “I’ll go by myself.”

#2 reason. Robeyns says the millions and billions of dollars one individual has is always obtained through the collaboration of the infrastructure it operates on - the highways and telecommunication systems and machinery utilized - plus the expertise of multiple associates and employees. My most venomous dislike is for people like Jeff Bezos, who has $235 billion but he prevents workers from organizing into unions, and he avoids paying health insurance by misclassifying workers as independent contractors. But he spent $500 million on his wedding. To summarize Robeyn’s point of view, she believes it is permissible to confiscate money from people with over $10 million because it should not be regarded as solely their money anyway.

#3 reason is the most important argument for me. It’s the ethical argument. It’s the argument that one person having excessive wealth that they hoard for themselves, that they don’t spend on relieving the suffering of their fellow humans… Ingrid’s belief is that this is morally repugnant behavior, it’s disgusting. I’m going to reference the ethicist Peter Singer now to back this up.

When Peter Singer was 26 years old, he wrote an essay titled, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” The essay asked us to imagine ourselves on a walk, wearing new shoes. Suddenly, ten yards ahead of us, we see a child drowning in a pond. As physically capable adults, we can easily save this child’s life, with no risk to our own welfare except ruination of our foot gear. Singer believed the vast majority of us in that situation, with an opportunity to save someone’s life, would do exactly that.

My goal is to further extend Peter Singer’s extrapolation. It is clear that people with more than $10 million have the ability to metaphorically save drowning children in ponds, but they aren’t doing it, so we, as the bystanders, need to encourage them. We need Robin Hoods to the rescue.

Dying isn’t the only death. There’s the death of ignorance, because people can’t afford good educations, the death of happiness because people live in pest-plagued slums, the death of opportunity because they can’t get satisfying employment, and the death of relaxation because people need multiple jobs to support their families.

Limitarianism can work; money can be distributed via laws, policies, land reform, nationalization of resources and industries, progressive taxation, maximum and minimum incomes, universal basic income, reparations, free education, debt forgiveness, halting tax havens, taxing churches, free internet access, all these measures can reduce the wealth gap.

I will end this by returning to Peter Singer’s drowning child in the pond. Let’s imagine the sinking preadolescent is the 4 billion people on Earth that earn less than $7 a day or the 187,000 homeless people in California or the 2 million California children that go to bed hungry or the Nigerians destined to die at 49 years, or the 1.5 million people who die annually of preventable diseases or everyone suffering because the rich keep getting richer as the backs of the poor are crushed.

Let’s imagine everyone who sees this drowning child in the pond dives in, and races to swim the fastest, to the rescue. Among us are people who are adept at gathering wealth. They swim quickly too, gracefully, they do not care about their Gucci and Balenciaga shoes. Everyone wants to save the drowning child because we are all empathetic, we all want to alleviate the pain and fear of other humans.

I want us to believe that nobody is saved until we are all saved. Nobody is free until we are all free. This is our purpose this is our moral ambition. This is the future I want to see.