A Ridiculous New Book Says We Don’t Love the Rich Enough

Sure, they have more power. But don’t worry, that’s only because they’re better than we are!

“Ye have the poor always with you,” says Jesus in Matthew 26:11, a statement that’s often said to express fatalism about the problem of poverty. Biblical scholars say that interpretation misses the point, but you can’t deny its predictive value: Two thousand years later, the poor are still with us, and so they will remain for the foreseeable future.

The same is true at the other end of the income distribution: The rich too are always with us. As with the poor, the question is what to do about that. A new book by the Northwestern law professor John O. McGinnis says what we should do is feel grateful. His title says it all: Why Democracy Needs the Rich.

McGinnis starts from the premise that liberals and the left expect to wipe rich people off the face of the earth. After all, didn’t Bernie Sanders say that every billionaire represented a “policy failure”? Actually, he didn’t. What he said was, “Billionaires should not exist,” as the first footnote in McGinnis’s book documents. You can call that a distinction without much difference, but bungling a quotation in your book’s second sentence does not establish credibility with your readers.

I don’t expect, nor particularly desire, to wipe rich people (nor any demographic group) off the face of the earth. But like Sanders, I recognize that the rapid proliferation of billionaires in recent years is a serious problem. Three decades ago, the United States housed a relatively manageable 129 billionaires. Today we have nearly 2,000. Since the start of the twenty-first century, billionaires increased their collective wealth ninefold, even as the bottom half of the income distribution increased its collective wealth a mere twofold. What liberals and the left desire is to reverse this upward economic distribution. Let me say that again. We need to stop distributing income and wealth upward from the middle class to the rich.

This is no pipe dream. Capitalism managed it before. During the half-century following the Great Depression, incomes grew more equal, or at worst didn’t grow more unequal, and the economy boomed. But starting in the late........

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