The Guardian view on inequality and the super-rich: the status quo is unsustainable | Editorial

Growing private wealth, combined with public austerity, is undermining the health of western democracies

In an intriguing study about to be published, the Dutch political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns poses a question that very rarely gets asked in mainstream politics. When it comes to the personal income and assets of the super-rich, how much is too much? The answer, she suggests in Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, should be anything above 10m. At that point, taxation should intervene, redeploying the surplus for the common good.

Ms Robeyns is not naive. She thinks of her 10m figure as a guiding ideal to be striven for, but one that is unlikely ever to become a reality given the current way of the world. Quite. Nevertheless, her provocative intervention is valuable, because it draws attention to a curious disjunction: as the wealthy have got steadily richer in recent times, soaking up the benefits of free capital movement, share price surges and rising asset values, political talk about wealth taxes has diminished to a barely audible murmur.