Share The Money! My Appeal to Cap Wealth at $10 Million and Distribute the Surplus for Public Welfare

Hello everyone, my companions in society. I’m going to start this speech with an explanation of who I am and how my brain mutated to embrace the point of view that I have.

I was born lucky, I’m from a successful dairy farming family, I was born with a silver cow udder in my mouth. I grew up in a three-story, seven-bedroom house with a swimming pool, an avocado grove and multiple cars including a ’51 Packard and a French Citroen. My college tuition was paid for, I got a trust fund that I gleefully squandered, and my great-uncle Larry, a childless alcoholic - died just in time in 1998 to leave me enough money for a down payment on three properties in San Francisco. I’ve been married 37 years, I have several children and a house in Piedmont with an in-law we rent out that pays 75% of the mortgage. My wife and I together are worth between $2-3 million in property equity and my percentage of a family-owned aquifer in Southern California.

Genetically, I can’t complain. My Grandmother died at 102. My mother is 97 still active and coherent. I am a very fortunate and grateful person. But I’m quite horrified by the casual cruelties of my species.

I’m going to tell tidbits of my past now to assemble for you the jigsaw of my personal philosophy.

I grew up as the rich kid in the big house on top of the hill but I didn’t have friends like myself. My first friend, when I was seven, was a skinny red-haired girl three years older than me. I called her Annie Okie. She had a huge family but she adopted me as her little brother. She forced me to hide in the barn with her, where the feral cats lived, she convinced me there were bandits everywhere, cattle rustlers led by Black Bart, a one-eyed villian who wanted to kidnap me and hold me for ransom, he’d cut off my fingers and mail them to my Dad. I believed her, I shivered and wept with fear, and I was hugely sad when she had to move away with her family, due to poverty.

My next best friend was Courtney Casey, also from Oklahoma, he had crooked teeth and talked funny and he was big because he flunked once, big enough to help me when kids tried to steal my lunch because they said I was rich and should hand over the sardine sandwich. Courtney and I hunted rattlesnakes in the Whittier Hills with bows & arrows in dangerous escapades.

Tim Kline was another friend, also from Oklahoma, with even worse teeth and a powerful accent. Tim grew up early, he learned how to drive when he was 13 so he could pick up his blacked out Dad at the bars. Tim’s Dad was a moonshiner, there was a still in his back yard that made delicious plum and peach brandy. Tim’s Dad also raised rabbits to eat, we watched the rabbits have sex, the bucks would ejaculate quickly then faint, with their legs twitching, terrible role models. Tim moved away when I was fourteen, due to poverty.

I also had a Mexican friend. Pete Reza had 12 brothers and sisters that slept in two rooms in triple bunk beds. Pete was two years older but he wasn’t big, he always got beat up by older boys who said his big sister was a puta, a whore. I don’t know if she was but whenever I was over she would stand in front of me wearing a beautifully fitted lavender bra and she’d say, “hey rich boy, go buy me a box of Tampax.” Pete would say, “don’t do it, Hank,” but I’d do it, every time. Pete joined the army when he was 16 to get away from the boys who beat him up and called his sister a puta, but he always visited me when he was on leave, he told me stories about his time in Germany and Korea.

My parents were horrified by my underclass friends, they wanted me to have rich buddies I could meet at the country club, but I decided rich people were boring, like me, they didn’t have serious, interesting problems.

Fast forward - My vocational history is very ADHD - many different jobs ranging from gardener to preschool director to managing director of a think tank to New York Times columnist in its brief Bay Area edition.

In 2011 at the think tank I conducted a survey of transhumanists to find out what they thought was the most important enhancement for future humans. Some said life extension, some said brain enhancement, some said ability to physically morph their bodies to change genders or resemble an animal. I said the most important goal was to liberate all beings from suffering. This is the Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva ideal that is also reflected in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, the American civil rights leader, when she said “Nobody is free until everybody is free.”

In 2012 I left the think tank because I was tired of watching PhDs just pass their white papers back and forth. I wanted to do something useful so I started a nonprofit, it’s called Humanist Mutual Aid Network, we provide sustainability grants, primarily in fifteen nations in west Africa. I email daily with partners there, women and men who are far smarter than I am, multi-lingual with amazing leadership and organizational skills and impeccable ethics, but they don’t have any money at all.

In 2022 I wrote an essay called “the Incredible Power of Purpose” for an education website. Writing it forced me to think more about my own purpose in life. Did I have one? What was I doing, really?In 2025 I read a book called Moral Ambition by the Dutch author Rutger Bregman. Reading it inspired me to write this speech that I dedicate to Count Leo Tolstoy and Prince Peter Kropotkin, two Russians born into privilege who abandoned the upper class to uplift the less fortunate.

My fervent belief, backed up by statistics I will inflict upon you later, is that there is an abundance of wealth on this planet, a surplus of money, enough wealth to eliminate a gargantuan amount of pain. The pain of unnecessary death and disease. The suffering of starvation, the suffering of ignorance, starvation of the mind, because proper schooling in unaffordable. The suffering of poverty and social humiliation and social immobility, unable to travel outside one’s village for one’s entire life.

From 2003-2008 I was a preschool director. I can tell you that one of the major tasks 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 and this is necessary, to 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 indoctrinate them to believe having-the-most is best, that financial wealth determines our value as a human, we tell them what-you-get is more important than what-you-give and thus, we end up in a world of where Jeff Bezos gains $26 million a day, but 4 billion people earn less than $7 a day. A world where wealthy people in Marin County enjoy an average lifespan of 94 years, but in northern Nigeria, people average only 49 years. We end up in a nation where the bottom 50% of the population own only 2.5% of the wealth. A nation where democracy is polluted by money, because politics, media, and economy are controlled by the very rich who pay less in taxes than the poor and middle class, who die in wars to expand the corporate wealth.

I believe the current system need to be overthrown, but what should replace it? To answer this question, I became a nerd reader of egalitarian 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 lustfully in the opposite direction, the anarcho-communism of the rogue Prince Peter Kropotkiin, Mutual Aid, Kropotkinism. I will always have a flame in my heart for Kropotkin, his huge 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 plan of Emiliano and SubCommandante Marcos, but this ideal was too indigenous agrarian for me. After that, I had a brief fling with Huey Long - the Kingfish of Louisiana - and his Share the Wealth plan that was far to the left of FDR’s New Deal, and I had an even shorter hookup with Rojava Confederalism - but the chemistry just wasn’t there, 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 the 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 for a sweet time - I thought I was home forever, her small family farms -- but eventually my love faded, I’m ex-agrarian, I left 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 that 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 Davos elite, who claim concern but they evade taxes, and fly private jets to climate conferences. We oppose the USA president, a billionaire, allied with other billionaires who want a government ruled by billionaires that serves 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 iat $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. I will explain my three favorite. The first reason is that excess money doesn’t make decamillionaires happy anyway. Studies indicate 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 the 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 tomorrow morning 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.” My friend was very anxious with the responsibility of owning so much money.

#2 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 - and via 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 union, 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 is the most important argument for me. It’s the ethical argument. It’s the argument that one person having enormous wealth that they keep all to themselves, that they don’t spend on saving or improving the lives of their fellow humans, that hoarding wealth that can alleviate suffering, is morally repugnant, disgusting, and sadistic. 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 safely save someone’s life, would do exactly that. He used this equation to insist that humanity help the victims starving in the 1974 Bangladesh famine.

My goal is to furher extend Peter Singer’s extrapolation. My belief is this: 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 in California. There’s the death of ignorance, because people can’t afford college, the death of comfort because people live in pest-plagued slums, the death of opportunity because they can’t get satisfying employment, the death of relaxation because people need multiple jobs to support their families, and the death of happiness because poverty causes misery.

How does Limitarianism work? How can money be distributed? Multiple ways are possible, via laws, and 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 and more can reduce the wealth gap.

I will end this speech 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 and giving it to the public welfare. They swim quickly too, gracefully, they do not sink with bitterness and resentment, 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 because we all feel connected. 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.