So, a Wealth Cap?

I can’t not talk about how Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. He’s a trillionaire, but in the U.S., 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2024, the highest since 2014, according to the Washington Times. He’s a trillionaire, but 181 million children will only eat one meal today, according to a UNICEF report. You and I are much closer to being homeless than we are to being a trillionaire. For context, someone earning $50,000 per year would need to work for 20 million years to become a trillionaire, and that’s assuming they don’t spend any of the money they earn.

I, personally, can’t conceive of a trillion, and I’m not alone in that. The Wall Street Journal created an article about this and says, “A million seconds ago was about two weeks ago. A billion seconds ago was in 1994, when Pulp Fiction was about to open in theaters. What about a trillion seconds? Whatever number is in your head, you might want to add some millennia—because a trillion seconds ago was back in the Ice Age.”

The article also has some neat visuals and a way to experience a million versus a billion versus a trillion by scrolling. So anyway, a trillion dollars is a lot of money, more money than any person can spend in multiple lifetimes, which brings me to my main point: There should be a wealth cap.

I could be wrong, but it seems like these days, many people would agree with that sentiment, based on all the “Eat the rich,” and “Get rid of the billionaire class,” posts I’ve seen floating around on social media. Sure, my algorithm is likely skewed, but I don’t see many people who hear the contrast of “People are literally dying of hunger while Elon Musk is a trillionaire,” not reacting with disgust.

In the socioeconomic theory I ascribe to, Prout, which stands for the progressive utilization theory, one of the principles is that there should be a collectively agreed upon ceiling on the amount of wealth which individuals are allowed to accumulate. That means no loopholes like, “Well, I don’t earn a salary,” while accumulating wealth via stocks and bonds. It means we as a society say, “No, one person should not be allowed to accumulate wealth unchecked.”

A wealth cap also stops the inequality problem before it starts, meaning none of this, “Let them accumulate all that wealth and then just tax them.” It’s much harder to tax someone due to the aforementioned loopholes than it is to say from the beginning, “You can’t have this much wealth to begin with.”

The fundamental reason behind a wealth cap is acknowledging that we are all connected. My spiritual teacher says, “The collectivity is not outside you – your future is inseparably connected with the collective fortune. You must take the entire collectivity with you and move toward the sweetest radiance of the new crimson dawn, beyond the veil of the darkest night.” To take the collectivity with us, we have to concern ourselves with what billionaires are doing and furthermore, not let people become billionaires (or trillionaires) in the first place.

I dream of a world where we recognize that wealth inequality affects us all. A world where instead of saying, “Eat the rich,” or “Tax the rich,” we keep people from becoming overly wealthy in the first place. A world where we create a wealth cap.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.