“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 1970s, that trend reversed, and ever since, incomes and wealth have grown steadily less equal. Worker productivity and wages used to rise in tandem; today they do not. (I wrote a book about all this.)
McGinnis quibbles half-heartedly with Thomas Piketty’s research on growing wealth concentration, but in the end he concedes that, yes, it’s happening. He’s more or less OK with that, because “the wealth of the richest has just grown alongside the wealth of the nation.” John D. Rockefeller, the richest American in his day, possessed wealth equivalent to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product; Elon Musk, the richest American in our day, possesses wealth equivalent to a comparable 1.6 percent of GDP. But let me remind you that GDP today is more than 30 times larger than it was in Rockefeller’s day. You might as well compare a hummingbird to Olivier Rioux. In Rockefeller’s case, it’s conceivable (though still unlikely) that the robber baron contributed to GDP an amount that approached what he extracted. In Musk’s case, that’s flat-out impossible.
McGinnis doesn’t begrudge the rich their growing influence because he thinks they’re smarter about economic growth:
Most voters have little incentive to form responsible views because their individual votes are unlikely to make a difference in an election’s outcome.… For the wealthy, predicting consequences is central to their identity. Successful people, whether forecasting market trends or anticipating regulatory impacts, spend their lives sharpening their predictive abilities.
McGinnis might have titled his book The Rich Are Just Better Than You. They “possess more knowledge about regulations.” They “have higher IQs.” They “possess the resources and networks to challenge popular opinion.” They “inspire others to participate in the American tradition of commercial enterprise and self-reliance, fostering a culture of ambition and innovation.” We haven’t witnessed this much fawning over the rich since the 1980s heyday of George Gilder and Robin Leach. And if McGinnis is to be believed, today’s rich “are likely more beneficial than ever.”
In McGinnis’s view, the rich provide a necessary counterbalance to the chattering class (journalists, intellectuals, entertainers); the administrative state; and what, in a throwback to James Burnham, he refers to as the “corporate managerial class,” a group that long ago ceased exercising power independent of Wall Street. Compared to these groups, McGinnis says, the rich have more diverse views. That will be news to Beth Reinhard of The Washington Post, who surveyed the 100 richest Americans (so designated by Forbes) and found that in 2024 more than 80 percent of their money went to Republicans. The rich, per McGinnis, also counterbalance “special interests”—by which he mostly means environmentalists who want to curb the planet-destroying tendencies of the fossil fuel economy and labor unions who want to give working-class Americans more wealth.
Perhaps the most distasteful passage in McGinnis’s book is the following wet kiss to Elon Musk:
Musk’s standing [with President Donald Trump] as a political adviser was rooted not primarily in his wealth, given that Trump has a lot of wealthy people from whom to choose advisers. Instead, it came from his unmatched reputation as an upender of the status quo.… [Musk’s] authority arises not primarily from his fortune but from his embodiment of values that many Americans hold dear: boldness, ambition, and innovation.
Oh, please. Musk gave more than $291 million to Republicans in 2024. That’s almost $100 million more than the second-biggest Republican donor, Timothy Mellon. Trump didn’t even like Musk; Musk bought his way into Trump’s (temporary) good graces. As for Musk embodying cherished American values, the man’s favorability rating was underwater even before he joined the White House. Earlier this month, Musk finished dead last in a Gallup poll on the favorability of 14 world leaders, with a 61 percent majority saying they didn’t care for him.
Is the influence on democracy of the rich uniformly terrible? Of course not. The rich fund philanthropies. The few that favor liberal politics bankroll liberal publications like this one and liberal organizations like the Center for American Progress. But there aren’t very many rich liberals, which is why (in addition to antisemitism) conservatives direct so much hatred toward George Soros. Although the economic activity that rich people generate creates wealth for others, it’s nowhere near so much as they would have you believe, especially in an epoch when the brass ring goes to the guy who scores the biggest return on the smallest payroll. The reigning champ at the moment is Matthew Gallagher, who through creative use of AI is this year generating $1.8 billion in weight-loss-drug sales with exactly two employees, himself, and his brother Elliot.
McGinnis says AI will make Americans appreciate the rich by creating even more wealth. (It goes without saying that he thinks “direct government regulations is [sic] likely to do more harm than good.”) But in a world of Matthew Gallaghers, how do the rest of us get a piece? We’ve seen this movie before. Over the past half-century, vast fortunes were created without improving the economic circumstances of the middle class or the poor. Even conservatives have given up reassuring the masses that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Among the few redeeming qualities the wealthy used to possess was that they never asked the public to love them. But in this narcissistic era, vast wealth isn’t enough; the rich also want to be adored. McGinnis is willing to oblige, but I don’t think he’ll create many converts to this cause.