“Eat the rich!”
I am hearing this phrase more and more as we look around and see an ever-growing concentration of wealth in just a few people’s hands.
In response, we see proposed taxes, legislation, and policies intended to keep money circulating through the broader economy.
Take the Washington State proposed millionaire tax.
At the local Safeway a man sits alone at a folding table, collecting signatures to oppose this tax.
Is he a millionaire?
No.
Like many people, he’s afraid that the wealthy may decide to leave the state.
It’s an argument I hear often. If we tax the rich, they’ll take their money somewhere else.
But how about we pause to think about why the current distribution of wealth isn’t doing us, the everyday people, any favors.
The problem isn’t that some people become wealthy.
Unequal outcomes have always existed, and most of us accept that they always will.
The underlying concern is whether that wealth continues to circulate or whether it increasingly pools
The Power Of Movement
Healthy economies, much like healthy watersheds, depend on circulation (I’ll come back to this metaphor in a moment). People invest in businesses, businesses hire workers, workers earn wages, spend money, and create demand. Assets change hands because owners are willing to sell them when prices make sense.
This circulation matters. It is what allows one person’s success to become someone else’s opportunity.
When capital moves, it finances businesses, creates jobs, funds innovation, and gives new entrepreneurs a chance to build something of their own.
Economies grow not just because wealth exists, but because it continues to move.
That isn’t what is happening now. There are critics arguing that what is happening instead is enormous concentrations of wealth allowing a relatively small number of individuals, institutions, and funds to acquire assets simply because they can hold them indefinitely.
Obviously, no single factor explains the challenges we’re facing today. But when I step back and look at the broader picture, one pattern keeps drawing my attention: the increasing concentration of ownership in assets that appreciate over time.
The New Reservoirs
- Housing: BlackStone has become one of the largest corporate landlords in the United States, holding an ownership interest in at least 274,000 to 300,000 residential units. Its portfolio heavily features apartments, student housing, and some single-family rentals, largely concentrated in the Sun Belt.
- Farmland: Our agricultural land is also being accumulated by investment funds. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder is currently the largest private farmland owner in the United States, with a portfolio of roughly 275,000 acres spread across various states (including Louisiana, Arkansas, and Nebraska).
- Timberland: Millions of acres are being aggressively amassed by Timberland Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs), Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), and billionaire families seeking stable, multi-generational assets.
- Water: If land is the foundation, water is the lifeblood. In some regions, investors are purchasing water rights, utilities, and infrastructure as drought and demand rise. It is quickly becoming just another asset to accumulate, transitioning from a basic public utility into one of the most valuable assets. It raises a difficult question about what happens when access to life’s most essential resource is increasingly influenced by markets.
The housing market illustrates this concern well.
If investment firms like BlackStone purchase thousands of single-family homes, they reduce the supply available for owner-occupants. They also don’t have any urgency to sell because they have access to financing and expect long-term appreciation.
Economists call this “asset inflation.”
Instead of wealth flowing through wages or productive investment, wealth increasingly accumulates through ownership of appreciating assets.
Existing owners become wealthier, first-time buyers struggle to enter the market, renters transfer more income to landlords, and the next generation finds it harder to accumulate assets.
Feudalism
History offers an interesting parallel.
In medieval Europe a very small landowning class controlled productive assets while most people depended on those owners for housing and livelihoods. Wealth accumulated primarily through ownership rather than labor.
We are not living in a feudal system, and economists often use terms like “Neo-feudalism” or “Rentier Capitalism” to describe what is currently happening. But as ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, there are some echoes worth paying attention to. When prosperity depends less on production and more on controlling scarce assets, upward mobility becomes harder and opportunity begins to narrow.
This brings me to my second metaphor.
The rainwater cycle.
Imagine, if you will, a healthy watershed.
Rain falls across the landscape. Water soaks into the ground, feeds streams, replenishes rivers, and eventually returns to the atmosphere to begin the cycle again. Different parts of the ecosystem benefit because the water keeps moving.
Now, imagine if dams, reservoirs, and private cisterns captured more and more of that water each year.
Eventually, less water reaches downstream communities, new growth is harder, the people who control the reservoirs gain increasing leverage because everyone depends on them.
The total amount of water hasn’t disappeared. Its circulation has.
Leverage vs. Circulation
Money and capital behave similarly. In a dynamic economy investment creates businesses. Businesses create jobs. Workers earn wages. Consumers spend. Entrepreneurs start new ventures. Assets change hands.
But, when capital becomes concentrated in appreciating assets that are held for long periods… land, housing, etc… the economy becomes less about circulation and more about accumulation.
Healthy economies, like healthy ecosystems, depend not simply on abundance but on circulation.
Wealth that continually moves through wages, entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment nourishes society.
Wealth that is increasingly pooled in assets by a shrinking number of owners risks becoming less like a river and more like a reservoir.
It is valuable to those who control it, but increasingly inaccessible to everyone downstream.
So when I think about the man sitting alone at Safeway, collecting signatures to oppose a tax on millionaires, I don’t see him as foolish.
I see him as afraid.
Afraid that if we ask the wealthy to contribute more, they will leave. Afraid that the reservoirs will dry up. Afraid that challenging the people who hold the most capital will somehow hurt the people with the least.
But that fear is exactly the point.
When an economy is healthy, everyday people should not have to fear the rich leaving in order to survive. Communities should not be held hostage by the possibility that wealth might pack up and go elsewhere. A functioning society should not depend on pleasing those who have accumulated enough to opt out of the systems the rest of us live inside.
That is not circulation.
That is leverage.
And I suspect that is why the phrase “eat the rich” is becoming more common. What many people are reacting to isn’t the wealth itself. It’s the feeling that the river has been dammed upstream.
Stop letting a handful of people dam the river and then convince the rest of us we should be grateful for whatever trickles through.
The question has never been whether wealthy people should exist or not.
The question is whether wealth should be allowed to pool so completely that everyone downstream is left fighting over what remains.
Further Reading
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, these are some of the reports and articles that informed my thinking. These resources do not all reach the same conclusions, but they offered perspectives on wealth, ownership, and the circulation of capital:
• Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality by Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphaphipat, Franto Ricka, Evridiki Tsounta (International Monetary Fund)
• Do Corporations Retain Too Much Cash? by Hwanki Brian Kim, Woogin Kim, Mathias Kronlund (The Review of Financial Studies / Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance)
• “Eat the Rich”: Ideological Cannibalism of the Status-Quo by Kelly Bartsch (Research Gate)
• Millionaires Tax FAQ by Washington State Democrats
• Why Capitalism Works When Choosing Wealth Creation, Not Wealth Extraction by Michael Murhukrishna (Evonomics Excerpted from A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, The MIT Press)
• Velocity of Money: The invisible pulse of the economy by James Chen (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)
• Understanding the Velocity of Money by James Chen (Investopedia)
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
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