the 2 percent levy and the colonisation of political imagination
Rafael Quintero Godínez, Senior ERC Fellow, University College Dublin
Solon redistributed land and cancelled debts in ancient Athens to preserve democracy from oligarchic collapse. This essay asks why contemporary proposals for wealth redistribution accept plutocratic thresholds that Solon would have recognised as a democratic failure.
§1 the symbolic ceiling
The 2 percent global wealth-tax proposal has become the radical outer limit of acceptable political discourse. When UN Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter proposes that such a tax on billionaires would provide social protection for 820 million people in low-income countries,1 he presents the idea as an ambitious transformation. When Gabriel Zucman places a coordinated minimum tax on the G20 agenda,2 the gesture is hailed as historic.3
This proposal has generated spin-off after spin-off and remained at the centre of debates on distributive justice. What troubles me is that it has colonised political imagination, fixing a minimal levy as the horizon of the possible. What should be a floor of decency has become a ceiling of ambition.
Recent news coverage of taxation policy is vividly asymmetric in its focus. The Guardian framed Norway’s 1 percent wealth tax on roughly 3,000 individuals as cultural civil war.4 Meanwhile, workers hand over large shares of income without fanfare. Their burden remains invisible. I propose this as a case of fiscal hermeneutical injustice (borrowing Miranda Fricker’s concept5 and applying it to fiscal politics). The experiences of wage-earners are rendered conceptually illegible, while the sensitivities of billionaires dominate public language.
Extreme wealth concentration poses a constitutional problem, not merely a redistributive one. Billionaires colonise the political sphere itself. Elon Musk purchases social media infrastructure and reshapes public discourse. Silicon Valley executives align with political power to design regulatory frameworks serving their interests. Bernard Arnault advises governments on economic policy, treated as if his fortune translates into democratic wisdom. When wealth translates directly into the power to set the terms of political life, democracy becomes performance.
What drops out of view is who pays when the top pays less. Shortfalls appear in childcare, elder-care, health, and social protection. This pattern of deficits is gendered as much as fiscal. Feminist economists such as Nancy Fraser, Diane Elson, and Marilyn Waring remind us that care and reproduction are structured by political infrastructure—the state either provides resources for care or starves them, determining who can afford to care and be cared for.6 To permit extreme wealth accumulation is to starve the very conditions of civic equality.
§2 when metrics displace morals
The current framing of wealth taxation shows how economic rationality can colonise political discourse, converting moral and constitutional questions into optimisation problems. One should be cautious before believing economics possesses a moral compass beyond the market itself. What is the standard deviation of democracy?
Economics can compute Gini coefficients with precision, yet it lacks any metric for democratic legitimacy or political equality. It measures concentration without saying when private wealth becomes anti-democratic power.
Feminist political economists stand apart from this tradition. Fraser, Elson, and Waring do not optimise within capitalism’s logic—they expose how that logic systematically devalues care, reproductive labour, and the material conditions of equality. Their analyses indict structures of power, rather than humanising their effects.
Recent Federal Reserve data illustrate the gap. The top 1 percent now hold roughly $52 trillion; the top 0.1 percent have doubled their wealth since the pandemic to more than $23 trillion.7 Media summaries report these figures as neutral facts rather than democratic emergencies.8 The Financial Times’ Big Read on “The Problem with Taxing the Rich” defines the problem as governments’ inability to tax the populations with extreme concentrations of wealth.9 A minimal levy is first paraded as bold, then later dismissed as impractical, constructing a corridor where only fatalism or technocratic tinkering fit.
§3 the poverty of progressive ambition
De Schutter’s arithmetic is morally devastating: a tiny slice of billionaire wealth could secure social protection for nearly a billion people, yet the proposal still appears politically precarious. When funding basic human dignity demands a heroic will, while preserving oligarchic fortune requires none, democracy has failed.
The current proposal is radically modest. It accepts that a few thousand individuals may rightfully control resources capable of transforming global welfare, then treats a token contribution from these individuals as the outer limit of what we can legitimately demand. The levy functions as legitimation, a symbolic gesture that soothes conscience while preserving power.
As Nancy Fraser argues, the response to wealth concentration must be political and systemic: a broad movement that recognises capitalism’s rapacity and seeks to deprive it of its material and institutional conditions.10 Anything less risks perfecting the management of injustice.
§4 Beyond the ceiling
Solon understood that democracy required structural limits on wealth concentration.11 Modern democracies must recover that insight. The question is no longer how much to tax extreme wealth, but whether such concentrations can coexist with political equality at all.
Two constitutional principles follow:
1. The Democratic Wealth Threshold
Wealth accumulation beyond a certain multiple of median household wealth within a polity ceases to be private property and becomes anti-democratic power. Such concentrations demand mandatory divestment through wealth caps enforced as constitutional maximums, comparable to how many democracies establish minimum wages. The mechanism is direct: above the threshold, holdings are transferred to sovereign wealth funds, community land trusts, or democratically controlled investment vehicles. Democratic legitimacy requires constitutional safeguards against the translation of wealth into political influence—wealth caps rather than wealth taxes, structural expropriation rather than progressive rates, and the recognition that beyond certain thresholds, private fortunes constitute a standing threat to democratic institutions.
2. Inversion of the Burden of Proof
The presumption of legitimacy must shift from wealthy individuals back to governments. What justification exists for permitting any entity to control resources sufficient to house, feed, and educate millions? Billionaire wealth becomes what requires justification, not its limitation.
These constitutional principles are preconditions for democratic survival. Intermediate measures—whether Zucman’s coordinated minimum levy, the elimination of preferential residency regimes like Switzerland’s forfait fiscal, or earmarking revenues for gender-responsive care infrastructure—matter only insofar as they build political power toward these structural transformations.
§5 conclusion
The 2 percent levy appears reasonable because it is designed to be. That reasonableness is purchased at the cost of democratic imagination. Treating minimal taxation as ambitious while assuring billionaires they “would not even notice” is to perform cognitive capitulation.
De Schutter is right that the money exists. The deeper problem is conceptual. By turning minimal concessions into maximum demands, mainstream discourse naturalises plutocracy and renders alternative futures unthinkable.
Democracy requires a re-conceptualisation of wealth itself. Beyond certain thresholds (whether held by a person or a firm), private fortune ceases to be legitimate accumulation and becomes structural violence against political equality.
Feminist theorists from Fricker to Fraser remind us that justice begins in recognition—in seeing invisible burdens and naming them. If we cannot name plutocracy as domination, we cannot dismantle it. History will not ask whether we taxed billionaires at 2 percent. It will ask why we mistook surrender for compromise.
- Patricia R. Blanco, ‘Olivier de Schutter: ‘A 2% tax on billionaires would provide social protection for 820 million people in low-income countries’’ El País (Madrid, 10 October 2025) https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2025-10-10/olivier-de-schutter-a-2-tax-on-billionaires-would-provide-social-protection-for-820-million-people-in-low-income-countries.html accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Gabriel Zucman, A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals (Report commissioned by the Brazilian G20 presidency, 25 June 2024). ↩︎
- Richard Partington, ‘‘A historic step’: G20 discusses plans for global minimum tax on billionaires’ The Guardian (29 February 2024) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/feb/29/taxation-worlds-billionaires-super-rich-g20-brazil accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Juliette Garside, ‘‘People are so angry’: how wealth tax became a battleground in Norway’s election’ The Guardian (London, 7 September 2025) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/wealth-tax-norway-election accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso 2022); Diane Elson, ‘Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute Unpaid Care Work: How to Close the Gender Gap’ (2017) 26(2) New Labor Forum 52; Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (Harper & Row 1988) ↩︎
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, ‘Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989’ (DFA: Distributional Financial Accounts, last updated 19 September 2025) https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/ accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Robert Frank, ‘The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52 trillion’ CNBC (3 October 2025) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/03/the-wealth-of-the-top-1percent-reaches-a-record-52-trillion.html accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Emma Agyemang, ‘The problem with taxing the rich’ Financial Times (17 September 2025) https://www.ft.com/content/43ab44ef-359e-4af8-bded-093be6e56f4d accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎
- Fraser, supra, end note 6. ↩︎
- Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution (trans Sir Frederic G Kenyon, Project Gutenberg, 2008) pt 12-13 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26095/26095-h/26095-h.htm accessed 17 October 2025. ↩︎