In the Introduction to her book Limitarianism, the author Ingrid Robeyns says her project begins with two ‘very urgent and largely overlooked questions. Can a person be too rich? Does extreme wealth have negative consequences?’ Suppose we just changed these questions slightly and asked, instead: Can a person have eyes that are too beautiful? Does the presence of extreme eye beauty have negative consequences? You might feel inclined to say the correct answers are: ‘That’s none of your business.’ And: ‘That’s irrelevant.’ And you would be right.

Your beauty, your intelligence, your good-humouredness, the elegance of your manners — these things all belong to you. They are yours, and it is not for other people to question whether you have too much of them or whether your excesses of them cause damage to others.

‘But’, the wealth questioner cries, ‘Your wealth is not yours in the same sense your beauty, intelligence or good-humouredness are yours.’ And that’s where they are wrong. And that is where their project goes wrong — right at the first step. For your wealth is yours in exactly the same sense your beauty and those other properties are yours. When you use your intelligence, beauty and those other characteristics, we call that your ‘labour’. And your labour is yours, for you are not a slave. And the fruit of your labour is wealth. So the wealth your labour produces is yours because your labour is yours. Furthermore, as well as using your labour to create wealth for yourself, you can give your labour away or you can sell your labour to other people. And in exactly the same way, you can give away or sell the fruit of your labour – your wealth – to other people and other people can give or sell their labour to you. And when they do so, it becomes yours.

Thus there is no ethical distinction between the questions: ‘Can there be too much wealth?’ or: ‘Can there be too much difference in wealth?’ and the questions: ‘Can there be too much beauty?’ or: ‘Can there be too much difference in beauty?’ Both are questioning whether you should really be permitted to have what is yours. And both are equally sinister, based on assumptions liable to lead to the most appalling oppression and de facto enslavement or even scarring.

Robeyns offers four reasons we should believe there should be a maximum amount of wealth permitted. She says the existence of high wealth contributes to the existence of poverty because the very wealthy garner the highest share of newly-created riches and also gain the most from government subsidies and tax breaks. She claims the very wealthy distort political processes through lobbying and campaigning. She says the very wealthy have gained some of their wealth (or its originating basis) at the expense of the climate and would not have become so wealthy if they had been paying the correct externalities taxes as they built up their wealth. And her fourth reason, which she says is the most fundamental, is that wealth is a matter of luck not desert.

These first two arguments are rather uninteresting. Obviously those with the most property tend to gain the most when that property is used. And if subsidies and tax breaks benefit the richest the most, then don’t have subsidies and tax breaks or don’t have those particular ones. This is nothing more than a complaint that government policies aren’t socialist enough. Very dull. Claiming the wealthy distort the political process amounts to little more than the familiar claim that some democratic political systems allow too much spending on political campaigns. If you think that, then have campaigning limits (like those we have in the UK). Or have limits on how much individuals can donate to political campaigns, but bear in mind that there are well-known objections, which explain why such limits don’t often exist. Why, for example, should views that are already popular (and so have lots of adherents willing to donate small amounts of money to fund them) get more of a hearing in a democracy that views initially believed by only a small number of people? Limiting spending on campaigning tends to entrench orthodoxies.

Objecting that wealth wouldn’t be as high if people had paid higher climate taxes at an earlier point might in some contexts be at least a challenge worth responding to. But for the current purpose it’s sufficient to note that it wouldn’t get us anywhere close to a limit on wealth. If someone with $10 billion would only have had $9 billion if she’d paid the right climate levies, that doesn’t remotely imply she ought only to have $10 million!

That leaves us with the fourth objection, which Robeyns rightly regards as the key one. She’s right insofar as there’s a good sense in which we don’t really deserve any of our wealth. We inherit some amount of intelligence, beauty, parental care, money, societal order and environmental placidity. We did nothing to create any of that, but without any of it we would have no chance of flourishing to the extent we do. Even the effort we put in and the self-discipline we exert owe much to our inherited biology.

But so what? Why would the fact there’s a clear sense in which I don’t deserve the things that are mine mean they shouldn’t be mine? I don’t deserve my beauty. I don’t deserve my intelligence. I don’t deserve my genetic propensities towards or against certain cancers. But none of these things are mine as some kind of cosmic reward. They’re mine because they’re mine. They’re not ‘ours’ such that it is for ‘us’ to get to choose, collectively, how much of any of them one individual ‘deserves’ to have.

A key reason people ask whether wealth should be subject to limits is that they envision wealth being transferred to the less wealthy. So although the question is dressed up as about the undesirability of ‘extreme’ wealth it is in the end as much as anything a device for seeking to reduce poverty and to elevate the wealth of the middle classes.

Closely connected to this, a key reason people debate whether wealth should be subject to limits but not beauty is that they do not imagine beauty being transferrable. But we could imagine some future world in which technologies existed to allow us to transfer beauty or intelligence. Surely the invention of such technologies would not suddenly mean there was a legitimate question of whether beauty could be excessive when no such question existed before! Rather, there must be a question of whether extreme beauty is damaging now, and should be redistributed as soon as such a technology exists. And furthermore, perhaps some extremes of beauty are so damaging that it would be better simply to reduce excess beauty now, even if we could not transfer it to others, much as we might accept that some wealth will inevitably be lost in the process of distribution (e.g. in bureaucratic costs or market distortions)?

Inequality has all kinds of explanations and serves all kinds of economic purposes. And some of those with extreme wealth do things like trying to land humans on Mars, trying to solve climate change with electric vehicles and trying to get an AI robot in every home — projects of potentially enormous collective value to humanity, not the worthless vanity projects Robeyns dismisses them as. But these things do not ‘justify’ extreme wealth. For wealth is not the sort of thing that requires any justification.

Perhaps for some people their wealth gets in the way of other things they would be better pursuing. Jesus told the rich young ruler to give all his money away because his wealth was preventing the ruler from doing the thing that would be best — following Jesus. The same may be true of extreme intelligence or beauty (there is a House episode in which a genius takes medicine to make him less intelligent so he can be happier). And if some very wealthy people want to give their wealth to charities, that is how they choose to use it and is their business, every bit as much as if you choose to use some of your labour working cooking meals in a homeless shelter, that is your business.

But at the fundamental level, what is mine is mine, whether that is beauty, intelligence or wealth. And whether I deserve to have what is mine is neither here nor there and is not a basis on which others are entitled to decide I have too much of it.

‘Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth’ by Ingrid Robeyns was published in 2024 by Penguin (ISBN: 978-0-24-157819-3). 336pp.