Andrés Manuel López Obrador addresses a press conference. EneasMx. July 2024.

Here in the US we don’t normally have much interest in the domestic politics of our neighbors Mexico and Canada. Mexico, for example, is part of our presidential election only insofar as immigration is a top issue. But we don’t ask “why are people from throughout Mexico and Latin America crossing our border in large numbers?”  

Mexicans aren’t just fleeing their homeland to enter the relatively safe and stable US – they are now leaving Southern Mexico for Guatemala, of all places, amid the near civil war there between feuding drug lords in Chiapas. As Mexico’s political system deteriorates, crime is increasing, and the outgoing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO as he is known) completes his quest to eliminate the independence of the country’s judiciary. 

AMLO’s administration has followed in the footsteps of other left-wing populist leaders in the Western Hemisphere in Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Nicaragua. He has decried “neoliberalism,” consolidated power, appealed directly to the poor, working class, and alienated middle-class of Mexico. During his time as president, AMLO had many confrontations with the Mexican Supreme Court specifically and the judiciary more broadly. Particularly in the last few years of his presidency as his power increased and his respect for the law declined, he and the court clashed as he tried to expand the power of the military, pull back from fighting crime and tried to ‘pause’ stable, productive economic relations with the US. This prompted him to push through a “reform” that will see every judge throughout Mexico subject to regular election, not lifetime appointment as American federal judges are, and Mexican judges were previously. 

He is promoting the reform as a way to eliminate judicial corruption, but this is a charade. The reform is merely a way for his party, the powerful Morena party, to exert control over one of the last independent institutions in the country. Judges will be beholden to political interests, not law. Voters in Mexico are completely unprepared to understand what makes a “good” or “qualified” judge. A voter in the capital of Mexico City, a metropolitan area of perhaps 20 million people, would be voting for thousands of judicial candidates with no information other than party identification, including for the Supreme Court. Money will purchase judges and corruption will far outstrip the problems the system now faces. 

Some US states, and some countries, have various forms of “elections” for judges, be it options for recall, yes or no votes on maintaining a judge, or even a few with regularly competitive elections. But federal courts are appointed for life, which provides some insulation from political forces. So why has Lopez Obrador decided to make this radical move? In Bolivia, which has judicial elections, the Economist just recently described the electing top judges as a “disaster” which poisoned the country’s politics. What’s bad for the nation as a whole, though, can still be very good for a power-hungry politician. In Bolivia, the two main competitors for the presidency are jockeying for support from the elected court and everyone understands that the court’s decisions are motivated by nothing more substantive than politics. 

In some ways, this looks like a return to the days of the monolithic PRI party that dominated Mexican politics in the 20th century. But there’s an additional reason why AMLO has proposed the reform. Destroying the judiciary as a counterbalance to the elected power in Mexico is straight out of the playbook populists have used to consolidate their control. In Venezuela, for example, President/Supreme Dictator Nicolas Maduro had his hand picked Supreme Court stamp his stolen election as legitimate, and AMLO has dreams of a similar scenario when the US or a future Mexican president comes after him for aiding Mexican drug traffickers or forces him to explain how he and his sons have bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland stuffed full of pesos. Once the judiciary is under control, populists next take over the central bank and begin to intimidate independent media outlets. The institutional and social checks on majoritarian power are eliminated creating an opportunity for dictatorship, and lifetime rule and enrichment through graft. 

How is this related to immigration and relations between the US and Mexico? Those Mexicans who are leaving for other countries see very limited economic opportunities, no domestic security, and no hope in their political institutions after a six-year assault on foreign investment, the rule of law, and economic development under President Lopez Obrador. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, the Castro boys in Cuba, Maduro in Venezuela and now AMLO, all claim to be men of the people fighting for the common person against the evil forces of capitalism and imperialism. Shockingly, the situations in their countries deteriorate, their citizens flee, and they consolidate their grip on power. 

More than $35 billion in direct foreign investment in Mexico is now on hold according to the Wall Street Journal. The peso, which has historically been a very stable currency, has dropped 15 percent since the judicial ‘reform’ was announced. Protests from the legal community and the political opposition are intensifying. In at least five of Mexico’s states, battles between rival drug organizations have produced bloodshed and instability. The costs to the Mexican nation will be enormous. Eliminating an independent judiciary may very well force Mexico to pull out of the USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA. Remember Mexico is the United States’ largest trading partner, and vice versa. Such a shift will have devastating economic effects on both sides of the border. 

But three sets of interests benefit from Lopez-Obrador’s plan. The first is the old institutional power brokers in public and private unions. The move towards economic and political liberalization undercut their ability to pursue graft, control jobs, and influence policy. They’d like a return to the “good old days” of no foreign businesses interfering with their rule of the labor market, which will increasingly become blurred as the private sector shrinks while the economy contracts. 

The second set of interests are those involved in the illegal drug trade. In the past, analysts argued that while the Mexican government lacked the capacity to effectively fight the war against the large cartels that once ruled the drug trade, under Lopez Obrador two things have changed. The first is that the days of the large cartels are in the past. The Netflix series Narcos is great television, but there is a reason it is set in the 80s and 90s. Now smaller operations, more prone to violent turf wars with unstable business operations, have replaced the once mighty cartels with bloody results. The second is that Morena has used local alliances with those in this new entrepreneurial drug “industry” to help ensure they have convincingly won local and state elections. 

Lopez Obrador in fact helped shield some of the larger drug organizations from US prosecution, which led to his infamous “hugs not bullets” policy. Whether he was motivated by a newfound interest in humanitarianism or following the requests of his friends in the drug industry, AMLO diverted military and police resources away from fighting the drug traffic. Unsurprisingly hugs did not stop the drugs, and the US responded by pressuring the Mexican government to work with them for high profile arrests, like that of the son of the notorious “El Chapo,” now in a US prison. According to press reports the Blackhawk helicopters and troops sent in to get him were not hugging anyone. 

Finally, this new system benefits the army, which is another important strategy in the populist playbook. As we’ve seen in Venezuela, once politicians control the formal political institutions and the criminal activities in society, they need the support of the army. Military coups are part of the landscape and history of Latin America.  

Lopez Obrador has adroitly freed the military from fighting the drug war, something they had no desire to do. Instead, he has placed the military in charge of lucrative endeavors like managing ports and airports. They have taken over the construction of major infrastructure projects. These activities are all in direct violation of the Mexican Constitution, and the Supreme Court ruled against these moves just last year in one of their many fights with AMLO. The possibility for political power and of course further bribes and graft at ports and large construction projects shouldn’t be difficult to predict. He has also essentially placed the police under military control, which has expanded the army’s power base. 

The third winner in all of this is Morena, and indirectly Lopez Obrador. His party controls Mexico, and should the judicial reform pass, their formal power may rival if not exceed that of the PRI. While some observers are hopeful that his successor Claudia Sheinbaum may pivot in a different direction and guide Mexico towards more moderation, it’s difficult to see how she might do so if she chooses to reject AMLO’s legacy. As one astute observer noted to me, while it is possible she may become her own leader and wish to escape AMLO’s shadow, a more likely alternative may be that she follows the Medvedev/Putin model and is simply complicit in allowing his rule to continue into a second term. After all, this observer said, it is AMLO who controls Morena, and Morena is the most powerful civilian force in the nation. 

The losers here are obvious. First and foremost, Mexicans of all social and economic classes will lose the lifeline that NAFTA/USMCA, economic liberalization, and attempts at political liberalism has created. Millions of Mexicans ascended from working class status “clase trabajadora” to the middle class through manufacturing jobs and foreign investment from the US and abroad. As others have correctly outlined, those treaties depended on a guarantee of an independent judiciary. While some of those commercial agreements may transfer to international commercial courts, many won’t. Existing investment may wither, and new investment will almost certainly go from paused to stopped.  

AMLO himself has a vision of Mexico that is very much anti-development. He has a romantic vision of an early twentieth century, rural Mexico. Whether his base will realize (too late) what that means for the future is difficult to tell. But if I were to predict the future, I’d return to the issue of immigration. While many across the political spectrum are falling all over themselves to oppose “illegal” immigrants, immigration has long benefited the US. Whether it was the waves of Southern European immigrants at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, the Irish immigrants from the 1850s after the Irish potato famine, or even the many Venezuelans who have entered the US recently, running for their lives from Maduro and his Cuban handlers. Immigrants come with skills, and they are willing to take risks and work. Once we move past the political grandstanding, we will eventually see how good it is to get a new influx for our workforce. 

But in the short term, these developments will be problematic for the US because Mexico is right next door and heading down a very dangerous path. Empowering one party, strengthening the military, destroying checks and balances, and allowing criminals to have free rein throughout Mexico will not end well for other countries. The attractions of militarism and the reliance of a strong hand “la mano duro,” as it is known in Latin America, is tantalizing. But it is a fantasy, a mirage that leads to dictatorship. Mexico should reject the abolition of its independent, albeit imperfect courts. If they need more evidence of how this will end, they shouldn’t look to AMLO for promises but look to Venezuelans and how their courts have protected the only one person — the dictator, not his subjects. 

Signage at the East River Plaza mall in Harlem, NY reflects grocery options competing side-by-side, including warehouse clubs and discounters. 2021.

Nearly two years ago, Kroger and Albertsons, America’s two largest traditional brick and mortar supermarket companies, agreed to a $24.6 billion merger. Ever since, the Federal Trade Commission has argued against allowing the merger, claiming that it would “lead to higher prices for groceries and other essential items” and “lead to lower quality products and services.” 

That led to a just-completed hearing (whose results have not yet been announced) about whether to grant an injunction against the merger, until the FTC takes its case before one of its administrative law judges. There are also state level challenges. On the other hand, Kroger has sued to challenge the constitutionality of the FTC trying their case before a “home team” ALJ rather than an actual trial in federal court.

However, the picture the FTC is painting of the “biggest getting bigger,” leading to consumer harm, is so muddled it cannot support their argument.

To begin with, simply looking at the increased number of stores in a merged K-A chain–to over 5,000–is far less indicative of any increased market power than it is being presented as. The reason, seldom even mentioned, is that “the vast majority of Kroger and Albertsons stores are in markets where the other is not located.” That means that in the vast majority of areas, where their footprints do not significantly overlap, merging the chains will create no increased market power to harm consumers. In all those places, the FTC case that merger will cause consumer harm collapses. In contrast, the claims in support of the merger, that it will allow merged operations to lower costs and make them more effective competitors for shoppers’ patronage at all their stores, still makes sense. 

The magnitudes involved are instructive. Most measures put the number of overlapping stores at about 1,400 (roughly 28 percent). How believable is it that K-A would go to the great expense of integrating all their operations just to be able to raise prices in no more than 28 percent of their stores? Not very.

In addition, not every case where the chains’ stores are in proximity would cause competitive concerns. I live in one such area. My wife and I live roughly a mile from a Ralphs (Kroger) and a mile in the other direction from a Vons (Albertsons), and between us, we shop at both of them multiple times in most months. But if they merged, it would not be a competitive disaster that puts us at risk. We are even closer to a Trader Joes and a Sprouts (in what was previously an Albertsons store) which we also shop at. We are two miles from a Walmart neighborhood market and a Target with a sizeable supermarket section. We are within 5 miles of Costco (and another one is being planned even closer to us), Sam’s Club, a Walmart Super Center and an Aldi. We also use Amazon and Instacart to get groceries. There is intense competition, whether or not Vons and Ralphs merge. But if that merger made them a stronger, lower-cost competitor, we would gain as consumers. And our case is not so unusual. Supermarket News has reported that “the average family today shops at five different grocers on a regular basis.”

Even if we ignore the fact that proximity does not equate to monopoly power to abuse consumers, it would only require roughly 700 divestitures (half of the number of overlapping stores, or 14 percent percent of the over 5,000 combined stores)–to address all such market power concerns. And Kroger has from the beginning offered to make divestitures to ameliorate the FTC’s competitive concerns (which have long been satisfactorily utilized for that purpose in grocery mergers), making it all but impossible to believe that such a Kroger-Albertsons merger would harm consumers. Interestingly, the FTC argued that the company who would manage the divestitures (C&S Wholesale Grocers) might not operate as efficiently as Albertsons, which would undermine competition. But since Albertson’s costs are reportedly higher than Kroger’s, the FTC is essentially admitting the case for the K-A merger increasing their efficiency. 

We must also understand that in antitrust, the higher the market share forecast to result from a merger, the greater the presumption of greater monopoly power and harm to consumers, and the more likely the FTC could prevail in litigation (despite a recent series of court losses due to its over-reaching). That provides a FTC determined to win with a massive incentive to manipulate market definitions to make monopoly power appear even where it doesn’t exist. For instance, say you had a small store on a street corner which sold salt, among other things. If it was the only store on that corner selling salt, defining the relevant market as sellers of salt on that street corner would make you a monopolist, even though you had no market power in fact. 

That explains why the FTC has in this case reached back into their long-rejected 1960s bag of anti-consumer tricks to get their desired result, aiming to uphold Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dissent that “The sole consistency I can find is that, in [merger] litigation under Section 7 [Of the Clayton Antitrust Act] ‘the Government always wins’.” Or as I put it elsewhere, “The government’s desire to demonstrate monopoly power to justify the rejection of a merger led to a cottage industry of sorts, finding ways to distort measures…to find monopoly power where there was no power to hurt consumers.”

In recent years, the FTC has defined the relevant market for such mergers as including “traditional” brick-and-mortar supermarkets (of which Kroger and Albertsons are the largest) and food and grocery sales at hypermarkets (Walmart supercenters). Further, they have viewed the relevant market as only including stores where a consumer could purchase all or nearly all of their household’s weekly food and grocery needs at a single stop at a single retailer, within a range of between two and 10 miles (depending on circumstances).

That definition is nowhere near reasonable today, unless that the goal is to maximize the apparent monopoly power a K-A merger would create, in spite of the current grocery market being perhaps the most competitive one in history. 

Walmart stores that are not supercenters are excluded. But Walmart and Sam’s Club have more than 5,300 stores, and its grocery revenue is more than twice that of Kroger and Albertsons combined. And when it comes to local competition, it is worth noting that 90 percent of the US population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart store.

Wholesale club stores, like Costco (and Sam’s Club and BJ’s Wholesale Club) are omitted from that definition of the market, which is particularly problematic because they also have a larger catchment area than supermarkets. Further, it is hard to see how they are not part of the relevant market when roughly 40 percent of Americans are Costco members, an average Costco (the world’s second largest grocer) store sells five times the groceries of the average US supermarket, and Costco does half again as much business as Albertsons.

Online sellers like Amazon/Whole Foods are also excluded, even though it is the worlds’ fifth largest grocer, and closing in on Albertsons. Aldi (also owner of Trader Joe’s) is excluded (as a “hard discounter” or “limited assortment” store), even though a quarter of Americans now shop there. Instacart sales are excluded, as are natural and organic markets and ethnic and specialty stores.

Looking at the broader grocery market also undermines the FTC claims. Kroger might be the biggest traditional grocery retailer, but they sell fewer total groceries in the US than Walmart, Amazon, or Costco. Even after the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger, it would only represent 9 percent of those grocery sales. And while a Kroger-Albertsons merger would appear to threaten competition based on their share of the FTC’s market definition, traditional supermarkets have been losing a great deal of market share to those excluded from that definition, showing just how effective they are as competitors. Since 1998, warehouse clubs and supercenters have seen their share of retail grocery sales double, while supermarkets’ share dropped by more than a quarter. In 2020, 98 percent of people who regularly bought “center aisle” products like paper towels, cleaning supplies and canned goods bought them at a grocery store, but by 2023, 37 percent said they bought none of those goods in a grocery store, largely shifting to online purchases. And now about one out of eight consumers buy their groceries “mostly” or “exclusively” online.

These results are summarized by the National Academies of Sciences description of the retail grocery sector as “highly competitive,” largely due to the growth of warehouse clubs, superstores and online retailers, which are overlooked by the FTC’s market definition, not threatened with monopolization by the prospect of a Kroger-Albertsons merger. And no amount of repetition of claims that consumers are being protected by the FTC’s actions makes it true.

A young waitress cheerfully takes orders from a group.

In Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World, Deirdre McCloskey and I distinguish the Bourgeois Deal — ”leave me alone, and I’ll make you rich” — from the Blue Blood Deal of aristocratic oligarchy and the Bureaucratic Deal of the modern welfare state. The Bourgeois Deal is the ethos of Adam Smith’s Commercial Society, and the permission-requiring and command-giving Blue Blood and Aristocratic Deals are the ethos of the Political Society. A single sentence embodies each:

Bourgeois Deal, Voluntary, Commercial Society: “May I take your order?”

Blue Blood and Bureaucratic Deals, Administrative Society: “That’s an order!”

Note the assumptions here about political equality — or the lack of it. The person saying, “May I take your order?” voluntarily subordinates himself to another’s wishes. The person saying, “That’s an order!” subordinates others to his wishes. The person saying, “May I take your order?” invites others to evaluate a menu of options in light of their own knowledge and preferences. The person saying, “That’s an order!” compels others to ignore their own knowledge and preferences. The commercial society’s order-taker asks people to cooperate. The administrative society’s order-giver commands people to cooperate.

Which respects others’ humanity and dignity? Which respects their knowledge, experience, and autonomy? 

Consider a chicken restaurant. “May I take your order?” contains a lot of information. It says, in effect, that a team of people who are there of their own volition — even if being there is the best of a lot of very bad options — stand ready to fry chicken obtained from one willing seller with knowledge about chicken farming and put it on a bun obtained from another willing seller with knowledge about baking. These willing sellers, in turn, went into their occupations with the conviction that raising chickens or baking buns would be the best way to provide for themselves and their families.

Political choices are different. The candidate who covets your vote offers an exchange of sorts — a “plausible belief,” to quote Thomas Sowell — in exchange for a vote. Still, it’s a plausible belief that the candidate will give orders that the voter finds congenial, and with luck, to other people. It is, in effect, an offer to make someone else do what you want them to do without you having to go to the trouble of offering them something better than their alternatives. It’s an offer to give other people “offers” they can’t refuse.

The great American statesman Daniel Webster put it this way in 1837:

There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters.

“That’s an order!” might be necessary under certain circumstances. Firms exist because of prohibitive negotiation and transaction costs. The military has a chain of command. It might be necessary to tolerate an evil like taxation to avoid the greater evils of invasion, subjugation, and domination. “Because I said so” isn’t an entirely indefensible response to a child wondering why he can’t drink the stuff in the bottles under the kitchen sink. These are exceptions to the general rules that Adam Smith, and so many after him, have thought should govern relationships between adults and equals, not general rules to which liberty is the exception. 

When we’re asking about the kind of society we want to live in, it might be possible that we should want to live in a society where we recognize one another’s right to say “no, thank you” to an offer — that is to say, a world where people take orders instead of give them.

Close-up of the in vitro fertilization procedure, with needle injecting into egg under microscope.

During the most recent debate with Vice President Harris, former President Trump declared that he has “been a leader on IVF… everybody else knows it.” Trump, of course, was referring to his recent campaign promise that the government pay for or that insurance be mandated to pay for all IVF treatment costs.  

Whether Trump’s proposal would make him a leader is a point of debate, given Democrats and introduced a bill mandating insurance coverage of IVF earlier this summer. But whatever the case, Trump’s IVF proposal would certainly lead in the wrong direction. 

The proposal has many downsides. To begin with, government-funded IVF would be enormously costly. A back-of-the-envelope estimate indicates that government funding IVF would cost about $7 billion annually. This figure assumes that the average IVF cycle costs between $15,000 and $20,000, doctors perform about 413,776 assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles annually, and IVF constitutes more than 99 percent of ART procedures/​cycles. 

This figure, however, assumes that the current number of ART cycles and average IVF cycle costs stay consistent, which is highly unlikely. Currently, most patients self-pay for IVF, which limits IVF use. Furthermore, a subsidized program creates new incentives for would-be parents to delay childbearing or engage in elective fertility preservation, leading to growing use of the program over time.  

Israel provides a case in point: in Israel, IVF has been publicly funded since it was first introduced in 1981. Reliance on the technology has grown since then, when it was a nascent technology, and between 1990 and 2012, the number of IVF cycles increased eightfold.  

Some of the increase in utilization is no doubt due to innovations that improve the procedure’s effectiveness. For instance, the development of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in the early 1990s meant that IVF became beneficial to a much larger portion of the population, as ICSI helped resolve many cases of male infertility. Even since major technological innovations like ICSI, IVF utilization in Israel has grown. The percentage of births attributable to IVF in Israel in 1995 was only 1.7 percent, but by 2018 that figure had nearly tripled. 

In large part due to its generous policy, Israel also has by far the highest per capita IVF use of any country. Israel’s generous IVF program funds unlimited IVF until a woman has delivered two live children, and benefit eligibility continues up until 45 years of age. Israel also covers elective fertility preservation, and in line with Trump’s proposal, Israel’s policy covers “all treatment costs,” including medication, procedures, testing, and more advanced add-ons like preimplantation genetic testing (PGT).  

If the US implemented a program that subsidized or mandated coverage for “all treatment costs,” substantial growth in IVF use would likely occur. Current IVF use in Israel is more than six times greater per capita than in the US. In countries like Denmark, which subsidize IVF generously but to a lesser extent than Israel, IVF use is still more than four times greater per capita than in the US.   

If a US policy were so generous that it induced Israeli levels of IVF use, the program would cost around $43 billion annually, or about what the federal government spends annually on its major housing rental assistance programs (housing vouchers and project-based rental assistance). Even if the program were “only” generous enough to induce Denmark’s level of IVF use, it would cost $27 billion per year, or more than NASA’s annual budget. 

Yet, unlike the federal government’s housing assistance programs, the benefits of an IVF subsidy would surely be regressive if fertility patterns hold. Under existing patterns, women with higher education or higher income are more likely to delay childbearing: according to CDC research 42.9 percent of women with a bachelor’s degree or greater delivered their first child at 30 or older. In comparison, just 3.3-10.5 percent of women with less than a bachelor’s degree delivered their first child at 30 or older. But older women are also more likely to run into fertility issues and subsequently utilize IVF. 

Given the current national debt and deficit’s threat to our economic stability and the related need for fiscal restraint, creating a new, expensive entitlement program with benefits captured by highly educated and high-income beneficiaries is misguided.  

Even setting aside such a program’s steep price tag and regressive profile, would the money be “worth it”? Trump’s stated motives for the program are pro-natal, yet it is not clear that a subsidized program would actually result in more births.  

The new incentives created by such a program suggest that growing reliance on IVF alongside fewer births overall is possible or likely. This is partly because would-be beneficiaries may falsely believe that a subsidized or mandated policy allows them leeway to delay childbearing, only to find that childbearing is more difficult later in life, even with the assistance of reproductive technology. 

Countries like Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Denmark have subsidized reproductive technology and still seen fertility decline in recent years. And in all countries that subsidize IVF besides Israel — a unique country not only because of its extremely generous subsidies but also its broader cultural commitment to natalism — the fertility rate is currently below replacement. 

Beyond the program’s enormous cost and uncertain or negative influence on births, a subsidy or mandate would conflict with some taxpayers’ views on conception and reproduction. While most Americans disagree with more extreme views put forward by IVF critics, it is nonetheless reasonable that critical parties not be forced to subsidize activities that they find objectionable. 

Although Trump’s plan is a disaster from the perspective of cost, incentives, and value neutrality, IVF is a true medical miracle for many couples with fertility challenges. Protecting IVF means protecting individuals’ freedom to avail themselves of the most successful procedure to treat a range of fertility issues and create human life, and doing so is critical.  

But protecting IVF from efforts to limit its use and reduce its efficacy does not mean subsidizing or mandating coverage. Trump and future policymakers would do well to enthusiastically defend the procedure, but avoid the cost and pitfalls of a government-supported industry. 

Revolutionaries burn a carriage in front of the Chateau d’eau in Paris during the French revolution. Lithograph, Nathaniel Currier. 1848.

“In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men….The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document.” ~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book. Chesterton’s observation thus puts the right question forward. The interesting thing about Limitarianism is not why it is so very flawed, but rather why Robeyns and others would think it was good. 

The thesis of the book is simple. Robeyns thinks it is wrong for anyone to have more than a million dollars in wealth, but she will agree to a compromise of a maximum wealth of ten million dollars. Robeyns doesn’t care what currency unit you use (dollars, pounds, or euros) as long as there is an enforced maximum. To the immediate reply that a 100% tax on wealth over that amount might be problematic, Robeyns repeatedly insists that she isn’t necessarily advocating that tax rate. Not that she thinks there is anything wrong with a 100% wealth tax, there are just other ways to get there. For example, you could convince everyone in the world it is bad to have lots of wealth. 

The bulk of the book is Robeyns shouting at the reader about why anyone having high wealth is so incredibly bad. First: “It’s Dirty Money.” Some wealthy people acquired their wealth by stealing it. Obviously, that is an argument against theft, not high wealth, but in a perfect example of how this book works, having established that we all agree stealing is bad, Robeyns then notes that people get wealthy in lots of other similar ways — like only paying whatever they are required to pay in taxes or owning companies that pay wages less than what Robeyns thinks workers should be paid. You see? Stealing wealth and not paying more than you owe in taxes are both “dirty money.” So, high wealth is evil. 

The roll call of reasons why high wealth is evil goes on like that for a couple hundred pages. High wealth is bad because it “undermines democracy” when wealthy people convince legislators to vote for things Robeyns doesn’t like. High wealth is “setting the world on fire” because rich people use airplanes and some corporations produce and use fossil fuels. Nobody deserves high wealth because wealthy people need a society in order to protect their wealth from theft, and the social contract should be fair and inclusive, not allowing people to get high wealth because of inheritance, luck, or having talent and the ability to work hard. Allowing some people to have high wealth is bad because “there is so much we could do with that money,” the “we” meaning (of course) people like Robeyns. High wealth is bad because it leads to philanthropy, which is terrible because the wealthy person gets to decide who should benefit from the philanthropic enterprise. 

Most of all, it would be good for the wealthy people themselves to give up their wealth because being wealthy is not only psychologically bad for the wealthy, but also the children of the wealthy really suffer from growing up with wealth. So, if you care about the kids, don’t let them grow up wealthy. I know that last sentence sounds like I am exaggerating and that there is no way Robeyns is as extreme as the last three paragraphs make her sound. But here is Robeyns: “People are free to make themselves as unhappy as they like. But that doesn’t take away our societal responsibility toward their children.” Similarly, the rich “are just as vulnerable, psychologically, as the rest of us, and if we care about the vulnerability of other people in general, then we should also care about how excessive wealth can destroy the lives of the super-rich.” 

There is an aura of unreality hovering over nearly every page of this book. The most jarring portion comes early when Robeyns sets out to refute anyone who thinks that all the wealth in the world today has been a big benefit to the poor. Lots of people are under the impression that there is less extreme poverty in the world now than there was in the past. Robeyns is here to assure us that this may not be true. Again, it may seem hard to believe Robeyns really says this. But, “the dominant narrative—that in the past everyone was very poor, and we have greatly reduced extreme poverty on a global scale—is misleading at best.” How is it possible that Robeyns could raise doubt about the fact that there is less extreme poverty today than there was in the past? First, the data before 1981 are not perfect, so maybe people really were better off in the past. Second, if instead of using $2 a day in income as the measuring line for extreme poverty, we use a higher number, then there are more poor people today than we estimate using the lower number. (Not surprisingly, she does not note that no matter what threshold you pick for extreme poverty, the global rate has declined.) 

Robeyns is willing to concede, however, that maybe there is more wealth in the world than in the past. But, even if so, the higher levels of wealth still aren’t a good thing. Because some people have much higher wealth than others, we cannot say that the increasing wealth is actually a good thing for the poor people who, while they may no longer be starving to death, are not as rich as the super wealthy. Her inability to acknowledge joyfully that there has been a massive decline in extreme poverty over time is tied very closely to the strangest parts of the book. There is no place in this book where Robeyns seems aware of the mechanisms by which wealth is generated. In Robeyns’ view, some very bad people have acquired a large amount of wealth by doing very bad things, and thus the net result of all that increase in wealth is negative no matter what has happened to the poorest people in the world. 

As I said at the outset, writing an entire review just documenting how bad this book is would be an incredibly easy task. Pick a page at random, and you’ll find multiple examples of an argument neither cohesive nor persuasive. The question is: how is it possible that the book is this bad? The answer is found in the Introduction. On the third page, Robeyns notes, “For a long time, I felt that there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why.” So, she “decided to deploy my training in philosophy and economics to answer the question: Can a person be too rich?” The arguments in this book did not lead Robeyns to her conclusion; she started with the conclusion. When you start your investigation already knowing the answer to the question, then you may not notice that the reasons you offer for your conclusion are not persuasive to someone who is skeptical about the conclusion. If it seems like the arguments are non sequiturs attacking straw men, that isn’t important to Robeyns. The conclusion is right even if the arguments fail. The result of this approach is a religious book written for the already converted. 

What makes Robeyns’ book so useful for understanding what many people are thinking is that it becomes obvious that people who want to get rid of high wealth are not reaching the conclusion because they are persuaded by reasons of the sort found in Robeyns’ book. Instead, it is an article of faith. If having high wealth is inherently evil, then the conclusion is obvious. There is no reason to permit inherently evil acts to continue if we can stop them. Trying to explain why high wealth is evil is beside the point; it just is. 

Ten Years After, the 1970s rock band, provides a marvelous way to think about this mindset in “I’d Love To Change the World.” “Tax the rich, feed the poor/ ‘Til there are no rich no more.” I have always thought those lines were pretty funny and highly ironic; taxing the rich to feed the poor doesn’t help end poverty; it just gets rid of the rich. But, in reading Robeyns’ book, my realization was that there are people who do not think those lines are ironic. Taxing the rich to feed the poor is desirable not because it will help the poor, but simply to get rid of the rich.  

Of course, the idea that a society should get rid of the wealthy is not new. Lycurgus, the crafter of ancient Spartan society, implemented a whole series of radical changes (breaking up large land holdings, forbidding the manufacture of luxurious items, inhibiting trade with other cities, forcing everyone to eat at communal meals) in order to rid Sparta of the rich. He seemed total unconcerned that Sparta would be a poorer society; Lycurgus’ ideal Spartan lifestyle was one devoid of any hints of luxury. 

Lycurgus provides an interesting contrast to Robeyns. Both have the ideal of a world in which there “are no rich no more.” There is an intellectual honesty in Lycurgus’ implicit argument that a poor-but-equal world is superior to a rich-but-unequal world. That is not what Robeyns is arguing, however. Limitarianism wants to have it both ways. Robeyns wants to get rid of the wealthy, but does not want to get rid of the wealth. In Robeyns’ Limitarian Paradise, there is no trade-off between the technological marvels and phenomenal wealth in the modern world and limiting everyone to no more than one or ten million dollars of wealth. Somehow, we can redistribute all the wealth in the world and still keep on generating just as much wealth in the future, even though creative and hard-working people have hit their personal limit on wealth. Robeyns argues this will happen if we develop a culture “where material gain is not the leading incentive — where people may also choose to work hard because of personal commitment, challenges they have set for themselves, or for intrinsic pleasure, esteem, and honor.” 

To pretend that you can have all the riches of the modern world and eliminate the ability for anyone to become wealthy is a sure sign of someone who has no understanding of how all this wealth was generated in the first place. Robeyns’ book, however, provides insight into why people advocating income limitation plans often seem so unaware of how economic growth occurs. If getting rid of rich people is akin to a religious mandate to rid the world of evil, then of course it is safe to impute bad motives to anyone arguing that there are possibly benefits to the world from allowing people to do things that will make them wealthy. Despite appearances, Robeyns book is not really an attempt to persuade anyone of her beliefs; instead, it is an insight into the minds of zealots.