The return of patrimonial capitalism

We may be raising a new generation of coupon-clipping Bertie Woosters.

Ebenezer Scrooge confers with his family trust adviser about the Rule Against Perpetuities.

The richest people in America, according to the Forbes 400, are:

1.) Jeff Bezos

2.) Elon Musk

3.) Mark Zuckerberg

4.) Bill Gates

5.) Larry Page

6.) Sergey Brin

7.) Larry Ellison

8.) Warren Buffett

9.) Steve Ballmer

and

10.) Michael Bloomberg

Collectively they sit atop about $1.3 trillion, or about 6 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Ten guys! That’s the bad news.

But the good news is that although none of them started out penniless, each of them amassed his gigantic fortune himself (with considerable help, of course, from non-union employees). The people who inherited their fortunes are situated one tier down on Forbes’s list, starting with the Waltons: Jim (ranked 11th), Alice (12th), and Rob (13th). MacKenzie Scott, who divorced rather than inherited her wealth, ranks 15th. The Koch family, which inherited a fortune and turned it into a bigger fortune, ranks 16th. The Mars family, as in Mars candy, are at 21. We Washingtonians have a proprietary interest in the Mars family, as they reside in suburban Virginia.

The Waltons and the Kochs and the Marses and MacKenzie Scott demonstrate that the U.S. is no stranger to patrimonial capitalism, but their presence on Forbes’s list below the salt, as it were, means American society remains a place where to possess billions in the triple digits you still really do have to make it yourself.

But it’s not clear how much longer that will remain the case. The top-10-ers are all going to die, I’m sorry to report, some sooner than others, and when they do that $1.3 trillion is going to have a much easier time finding its way into their wayward children’s pockets than in previous epochs. Some, like Warren Buffett, have made arrangements to minimize what they leave to their family, but any limits placed on this transfer of wealth, or the other $67 trillion or so that will pass down from one generation to the next over the next quarter century, will have to be self-imposed. That’s because a giant dirty snowball of bad government policies involving inheritance taxation, capital gains tax, the Rule Against Perpetuities, generation-skipping trusts, and copyright extension are conspiring to turn the United States into a European-style wealth aristocracy. The dead will be wealthier than the living.

This, and the near-criminal unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to do anything about it, constitute the subject of my latest New Republic piece, “Defund the Dead.” I’m sorry to drop it on Christmas Eve, but the most popular Christmas story ever told, outside of the Bible, was a ghost story, so perhaps my story about undead dollars taking charge of the U.S. economy isn’t out of place.