06/18/2026
From "Patriotic Millionaires," a concise comment on how wealth inequality was baked into the U.S. from the beginning. This kind of analysis lies behind my "Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke's Jesus and Sabbath Economics." Take 5 minutes to read this excerpt below, as an appropriate reflection for both Juneteenth and July 4th:
"Elon Musk is America’s and the world’s first trillionaire. While the news cycle appears to be moving past this milestone (a little too quickly in our eyes), we think this warrants more attention. We’ve been warning about this moment for over a decade. In fact, our Senior Vice President for Tax Policy, Bob Lord, predicted this moment thirteen years ago.
It’s hard to emphasize just how historic a moment this is, largely because it’s difficult to convey just how much money $1 trillion actually is—or, we should say, $1.3 trillion, as that’s how much Musk is actually worth as of this writing.
It’s a bit eerie that we’re witnessing the birth of our first trillionaire on the eve of America’s 250th birthday. More than that, it’s time we acknowledge the Founding Fathers’ complicated role in delivering America its first trillionaire 250 years after they declared independence from the British monarchy. The Founders expressed concerns about extreme wealth concentration, but their actions set in motion the creation of the very “aristocracy of wealth” that they purportedly feared.
But we have a plan to change that. Extreme wealth concentration is dangerous to our economy, democracy, and environment. But this isn’t a novel idea, because it’s something that America’s Founding Fathers warned us about centuries ago. While superyachts, private jets, and $292 million campaign donations weren’t a thing when these Founding Fathers were around, they witnessed what concentrated wealth did in the hands of a select few monarchs and aristocrats.
Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers’ talk about wealth concentration was cheap. That’s because they took critical actions in America’s infancy that set America down the path to having a trillionaire just in time for our nation’s 250th birthday.
We would be remiss if we failed to mention that many of the Founders owned slaves. This is the most egregious and repugnant form of the Founders’ hypocrisy on the issue of extreme inequality. For example, while Thomas Jefferson was opining “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, he also enslaved hundreds of people on his Virginia plantation, Monticello, and other properties.
If enslavement does not represent the highest form of wealth inequality, it certainly represents the highest form of inequality with regard to power. Therefore, it was hypocrisy of the highest order for the Founders to express sentiments favorable to economic equity and democracy while also owning human beings. This is an especially poignant reminder as we approach Juneteenth—the commemoration of the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery, on June 19, 1865—and recognize that Black Americans still deal with many vestiges of slavery today which exacerbate inequality.
It's less well-known, but the Founders also took key steps when crafting the Constitution to protect moneyed interests. In fact, this was the driving force behind the whole Constitutional Convention of 1787. We typically look back to policy decisions made in the 1980s and onwards that set inequality on fire, but you could say the Founders are the ones that made the matches that set the fire in the first place.
Northwestern University Professor Jeffrey Winters explains this in his new book, The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy. According to Winters, when the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution in 1787, four years after the end of the Revolutionary War, America was suffering from a debt crisis, with many people being thrown into prisons as a result of being unable to pay back their debts. In response, working people used their voting power at the state level to enact debt jubilees and release the imprisoned. This was a blow to ultra-rich debt holders, and the Founders did not like this. Therefore, at the Constitutional Convention, one of their top priorities was to limit what they viewed as an excess of democracy via state governments. They accomplished this through Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, which places sharp restrictions on state governments, and by creating bodies like the Senate and a five-person Supreme Court and giving the president veto power, all of which could work to block policies that threatened the wealthy’s interests.
Winters argues that the Founders were committed to freedom, liberty, and the consent of the governed, but—despite what they said—they also were committed to protecting the wealth pyramid. And that’s how we ended up with a system of what he calls “participatory inequality:” we have all the superficial trappings of democracy—the right to vote, free speech, etc.—but still have the greatest levels of economic inequality in human history, counter to what people want.
The Founders’ words were in the right place on the issue of extreme wealth concentration. But unfortunately, their actions were not. They’re really not all that different from today’s politicians, who talk a good talk about fighting for working people, but don’t actually walk the walk when it comes to advancing legislation that serves their interests."
Read more at https://patrioticmillionaires.org/?link_id=20&can_id=ab1f48a3f7be44fc3b1393b7e4720665&source=email-the-path-to-our-first-trillionaire-started-250-years-ago-2&email_referrer=email_3288502&email_subject=how-the-founders-feared-an-aristocracy-of-wealth-but-helped-deliver-our-first-trillionaire
--CM
Tax the Rich. Wealthy Americans like us have rigged the tax code to give ourselves countless handouts, leaving working people paying higher rates than billionaires. We need to build a tax system that puts a check on the extreme inequality that threatens our economy and our democracy. Learn more
