Summer Reading: The Trouble With Billionaires

Neil Buchanan (George Washington) reviews Linda McQuaig & Neil Brooks, The Trouble With Billionaires, (Viking Canada, 2010), in Should We Tax the Rich, or Leave Them Alone:

Some books are years ahead of their time, while others are stale before they are printed.  The Trouble with Billionaires, which was published last September, was almost perfectly timed, hitting the bookshelves just as we became aware of the increasing influence of a handful of billionaires on the political system in the United States.  Although the authors are Canadian (McQuaig a journalist, and Brooks one of the top tax academics in the world), they perfectly captured the current political moment in the U.S.  The super-wealthy now truly run the show, and they are less shy than ever about doing so. ...

The book concludes with a bold list of redistributive policy prescriptions, none of which are currently thinkable in the U.S. (or, apparently, in many other countries).  McQuaig and Brooks’s achievement lies in making the argument that extreme wealth will do all that it can to perpetuate itself, including making taxing the rich politically toxic.  The answer is not to pretend that we can ignore the power of the wealthy.  The only answer is to confront it.