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Seventy per cent sounds like a lot. People can probably grasp that at those rates there would be little incentive to earn more income, and that earning income is not something we really want to discourage. But a measly little two per cent tax, as Warren puts it, on “the diamonds, the yachts, the Rembrandts”? Would they even miss it?

Before we rush off to the Levelers Ball, however, we might want to ask a few more questions. Of these the most impolitic would be: what is the problem to which this is a solution?

Things often aren’t quite as simple as they appear, as every generation learns anew

It is noteworthy how the debate on inequality has shifted in recent years: from the problem of poverty, whose evils are obvious, to the “problem” of great wealth; from the gap between the poor and the rest of us, to the gap between the rest of us and the rich, or indeed between the rich and the very rich.

But it is not obvious why it is wrong, in itself, that a small number of people should get stinking rich. It is clearly objectionable if they did so by illicit or unethical means — but then it is the means itself, not the wealth, to which we object. And it would be in poor taste, at the least, if they spent it all on themselves. But that is not how the great fortunes are typically disposed of — it’s physically impossible to spend more than a small fraction of it.

Perhaps the argument is less that the rich are too rich than it is that the government is too poor. You can make a case that government should spend more on certain things, especially in America. It doesn’t follow that you need to raise taxes to do so. A lot of good new spending could be funded by cutting bad old spending.