Citizenship, globalism and the super-rich
WHAT JESUS DID NOT SAY was “The rich ye will have always with you”. It was not simply that the rich had no more chance of getting to heaven than a camel had of getting through the eye of a needle; their presence on earth was an irksome embarrassment too. At most times in history plutocrats throwing their weight about have been perceived as a threat to the social order and an affront to our sense of fairness. Aristotle, in his Politics, records with approval how democratic societies ostracized those oligarchs who “seemed to predominate too much through their wealth”, for “the encroachments of the rich are more destructive to the state than those of the people”. Plato, in the Laws, says that the lawgiver shall allow a man to possess up to four times as much as the allotment to the poor (what we might call “the poverty line”), but that any surplus he acquires above that is to be forcibly handed over to the state – in effect the first super-tax.
This distrust carries through to the Middle Ages. In 1370 the astronomer-philosopher Nicole Oresme, glossing Aristotle, declared that “the rich [superabundantes] are so unequal and exceed and overcome the others regarding their political power that it is reasonable to think that they are as God is among men”; like Aristotle he recommended ostracizing them. He also repeated Plato’s prescription for “a law establishing that a man cannot have properties above a certain quantity due to inheritance or otherwise”. Guido Alfani, in his exhaustive history of the superrich through the ages, adapts Oresme’s remark for his title and points out that, in our own time, Thomas Piketty’s hugely popular Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) rehearses many of the same arguments. Over the past twenty years there has been a flood of books lamenting the growth of inequality, the unlovely antics of the superabundantes and their toxic ability to fuse wealth and political power, often by dubious if not downright illegal means.
From ancient times the influx of the novi homines, the nouveaux riches, the arrivistes, has provoked shudders from old money, each generation fondly imagining that it is the first to be thus afflicted. It is amazing how m
