The danger that extreme wealth poses to democracy is ever-present, and the idea that it must be restrained is almost as old as democracy itself. In 1792, Thomas Paine wrote that the freedom of elections was "violated by the overbearing influence" of inherited wealth, and proposed an extremely aggressive wealth tax that would have put a hard ceiling on how much wealth a person could accumulate. Nearly a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously observed: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Paine's plan to fix this problem was the right one: taxation. America's ever-increasing inequality has motivated recent tax proposals targeting the ultra-rich, but the primary purpose has been to raise revenue, with any reduction in our concentration of wealth being incidental. While we do not oppose any of those proposals, we believe America needs a tax designed exclusively for the purpose of addressing the threat that our extreme concentration of wealth poses to democracy.
