“It is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.”
-Huey Long, 1934
American politics is plagued by an assortment of things rendering our democracy effectively broken, like the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court supermajority, the Electoral College that gives a small handful of states outsized influence over our elections, and of course a shamelessly corrupt president who has bragged about his adult children making investments with the help of “inside information.” But the root issue behind all of this ultimately ties back to money in politics. And that root issue could be largely addressed with the philosophy of limitarianism.
As Dutch political scientist Ingrid Robeyns wrote in her 2024 book, “The Case Against Extreme Wealth,” limitarianism is simply defined as “a cap on the amount of wealth one person can have.” Robeyns argued that in an ideal scenario, governments would first act to make sure citizens all have equal opportunities to succeed in society by implementing programs like universal healthcare, free public education through the college level, affordable childcare for parents, and various anti-poverty measures to make sure no one succumbs to destitution.
But in the absence of that, Robeyns argued “fiscal action” would be necessary to prevent the super-rich from accumulating so much wealth that it becomes detrimental to society as a whole. And she stressed that striving for equality of opportunity shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a call for everyone to have an equal amount of money or for the abolition of private property, pointing out that those who are willing to work longer hours or take more risks should naturally be able to reap the rewards of those choices.
This is what makes limitarianism so appealing in a society like modern-day America: we can still celebrate success while simultaneously putting a cap on net worth. We all root for the success of our favorite athletes, musicians, and actors. Our history is full of innovators who had a brilliant idea for a product, worked long hours to build and design it, and became fabulously wealthy as a result.
I’ll personally admit that while nobody should be a billionaire, if anyone deserves to be one, it’s Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He turned a website that sold books into not just a global e-commerce giant, but a media company and a logistics innovator that’s able to get an item from a warehouse shelf to your doorstep in mere hours.
But at the same time, Jeff Bezos has amassed a net worth that, as of this writing, is in excess of $278 billion. That’s one man with a personal wealth that rivals the total economic output of New Zealand. It’s an undeniable fact that at a certain point, money stops being a way to improve one’s lifestyle and instead becomes a way to exert power over others.
A centimillionaire and a billionaire are both capable of owning mansions and luxury cars and yachts. But only a billionaire is capable of buying media outlets, hiring lobbyists, and launching super PACs to get his puppet politicians elected to do his bidding.
Having a Billionaire Class Is Corrosive to Democracy
“Momma said there’s only so much fortune a man really needs. The rest is just for showing off.”
-Forrest Gump, 1994
A good example of this can be seen when looking at the lives of Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel and MySpace founder Tom Anderson. MySpace was the first major social media platform, and had more than 70 million users at its peak in the late 2000s. He sold his company to Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp for $580 million in 2005, just two years after MySpace’s launch. Anderson went on to retire in 2009 at the age of 39 and travel the world. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Anderson still has $60 million to his name.
Thiel, who co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek, is currently the chairman of mass surveillance technology company Palantir, and his Founders Fund is a key investor in Flock Safety — the same company behind the 100,000-plus automatic license plate reader cameras that have been routinely misused and abused by law enforcement to spy on Americans without a warrant. Thiel, who has a net worth of approximately $27 billion, is also responsible for bankrolling Vice President JD Vance’s political career.
Both Tom Anderson and Peter Thiel have multiple homes. Anderson has houses in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. Thiel has opulent mansions in Argentina, Miami, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Both travel the globe, live in comfort, and have more than enough money for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. But only Thiel has enough wealth to grant himself the power to influence governments in his favor. By taxing all of the Peter Thiels of the world out of existence, we can make room for more Tom Andersons.
It wasn’t that long ago when America had a government that wasn’t shy about imposing much larger taxes on the wealthiest citizens in order to create a better society for everyone else. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out in 2016, the top marginal tax rate under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 was in excess of 90 percent for every dollar above $200,000 earned annually. That’s roughly $2.48 million in 2026 dollars. If we had that tax rate in place today, it would only apply to a little over 150,000 Americans who rank among the top 0.1 percent of income earners.
That high marginal tax rate allowed for the creation of the interstate highway system, with 41,000 miles of roads connecting the continental United States for the first time in history. That project cost roughly $41 billion, which would amount to roughly $503 billion in today’s dollars. And as we were spending the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars on connecting the country, America experienced arguably its most prosperous period, even as top tax rates were at their highest.
Starting in 1944 under then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the top marginal tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans jumped from 88 percent to 94 percent, and it stayed there until dropping to 91 percent in 1946. During the end of the Harry S. Truman presidency, the top tax rate climbed once again to 92 percent in 1952, and it didn’t drop below 91 percent until 1964, when President John F. Kennedy cut the top rate to 77 percent.
During those two decades, the United States’ annual GDP growth averaged 5.6 percent in the 1940s, and 4.2 percent in the 1950s. In the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan lowered the top marginal tax rate from 71 percent in 1981 to just 28 percent in 1988, annual GDP growth also fell to an average of just 3.1 percent. Essentially, when the rich pay higher tax rates, the economy as a whole is better off. And when they pay lower rates, the economy stagnates and inequality worsens.
Inequality has now reached a point where Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — the world’s richest man whose net worth briefly surpassed the $1 trillion mark after SpaceX launched its IPO in June of 2026 — is brazenly using his wealth to buy elections. After spending roughly $250 million helping Donald Trump win the 2024 election, Musk is now committing $100 million to helping Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll be concentrating that money in states where Republicans are facing the toughest odds of keeping seats red, like Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio.
$100 million may sound like a lot to us, but that’s just 0.014 percent of his estimated $690 billion net worth. If someone earning $60,000 wanted to spend that same portion of their annual salary on donating to a political candidate, they would only have to write a check for $8.40.
Given the heightened political activity of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, it could be argued that we’re in an arms race against the billionaire class to rein in their capacity to drastically reshape the government and society as a whole permanently in their favor over the next two election cycles. If we don’t do it soon, we may not get another chance.
Taking away Donald Trump’s Republican majorities in the House and Senate has to come first this November. Replacing him in 2028 with a president willing to take bold steps to tax the billionaire class out of existence is the next step. And the third step will be organizing a mass movement based on limitarianism to force that government to ensure that no one person can ever amass so much wealth as to rival the government itself.
How Limitarianism Can Stop the Billionaires
“If we could only succeed in having the government hold fortunes down to a few million dollars to any one man, then there would be something on which to run the country and for the people. When I proposed such a thing here, it looked like it would set the woods on fire against me.”
-Huey Long, 1933
Perhaps the first real pioneer of limitarianism in the United States was US Senator Huey Long (D-Louisiana), who represented the Bayou State during the height of the Great Depression. Long was known for his opposition to FDR’s New Deal — not because of its massive investments in public sector jobs and anti-poverty programs, but because Long felt the New Deal didn’t go nearly far enough.
In his “Share Our Wealth” plan, the Louisiana Democrat proposed capping personal wealth at $50 million, which would be the equivalent of $950 million in 2025 dollars. If Huey Long were alive today, he would likely be calling for all wealth in excess of $1 billion to be taxed at 100 percent.
In his February 1934 “Every Man a King” radio address, Long made the case that if we allow a small handful of exceedingly wealthy individuals to gobble up more wealth, it will become impossible for ordinary Americans to ever have the opportunity to afford a decent life for themselves and their families. He called for a guaranteed family net worth of $5,000 per household (which would be a little over $125,000 today), saying that would be “enough for a home, an automobile, a radio, and the ordinary conveniences, and the opportunity to educate their children… so there will be no such thing as a family living in poverty and distress.”
“We propose to limit the wealth of big men in the country,” Long said. “We do not propose to divide it up equally. We do not propose a division of wealth, but we propose to limit poverty that we will allow to be inflicted upon any man's family.”
“We have to limit fortunes. Our present plan is that we will allow no one man to own more than $50 million,” he continued. “...It will still be more than any one man, or any one man and his children and their children, will be able to spend in their lifetimes; and it is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.”
A contemporary example of Long’s proposal could be seen in Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (PDF link). Piketty proposed implementing an annual wealth tax specifically targeting the super-rich. The bestselling economist proposed a small one percent tax on net worths between $1.3 million and $6.5 million, and two percent for assets in excess of $6.5 million. Piketty’s proposed wealth tax rates would climb gradually depending on how much wealth an ultra-high net worth individual has, with rates as high as 90 percent for those with net worths exceeding $2 billion to discourage the accumulation of wealth.
Even if such a wealth tax were in place, it wouldn’t affect most wealthy celebrities who became fabulously rich due to their own hard work and talent. Future NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady would still get to keep the vast bulk of his estimated $890 million fortune. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson would still have most of his $800 million in wealth. Madonna would still have a significant portion of her $850 million.
And while the few famous entertainers who have reached billionaire status like Taylor Swift ($2 billion), LeBron James ($1.4 billion), Arnold Schwarzenegger ($1.2 billion), Oprah Winfrey ($3.4 billion), Tyler Perry ($1.4 billion), Rihanna ($1 billion), Jay-Z ($2.8 billion), and Beyonce ($1 billion) would take a more significant hit, none of their lifestyles would change, nor would the lifestyles of their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren be affected. Once someone has reached that level of wealth, money ceases to be a material concept and simply becomes numbers on a screen. Those numbers would admittedly be smaller, but they would still live lives of luxury and opulence most people can’t even fully comprehend.
How to sell Limitarianism to the Public
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1941
Once someone has hit multibillionaire status, their net worth can easily grow larger even as they actively seek to give away their fortunes. One great example of this is Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, who has a net worth of $33.6 billion. That’s more than the GDP of over 70 countries.
In 2025 alone, Scott gave away more than $7.2 billion to charity, which, to her credit, is more than her former husband and most other billionaires have given away over the course of their entire careers. And yet Scott still became $268 million richer last year due to Amazon’s stock price rising. A billionaire adding another million dollars to their net worth while more than three million children die of starvation every year is akin to someone dying of thirst watching someone pour a bottle of water into an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The United States is the wealthiest country on earth. And it makes no sense for such a large portion of that wealth to be hoarded by a small number of people who already have far more than they could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes. Everyone deserves the chance to strike it rich, either through inventing something groundbreaking, becoming one of the premier athletes in their sport, making music millions of people enjoy, or even just through working hard and making smart investments. That’s one of the things that draws so many people to America.
But if private citizens are permitted to amass enough wealth to rival the political power of public institutions, democracy won’t survive for long. Limitarianism is necessary to prevent a group of wealthy oligarchs from buying the ability to wield power over the rest of us.
Just as a social safety net prevents people from becoming so destitute that they die due to lack of food and shelter, we as a society have to ask how much power we let the super-rich accumulate before they use it to deny freedom and opportunity to the rest of us. Limitarianism isn’t meant to put the government on a throne above the wealthy, but to prevent the wealthy from building their own throne to lord over ordinary citizens.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
