You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

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You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

Originally published in our magazine’s hallowed print edition

2026<br>May/June

Details

A new book argues that “Democracy Needs the Rich.” In fact, concentrated wealth destroys any semblance of a democratic society.

Nathan J. Robinson & Rob Larson

filed 15 June 2026<br>in

Book Reviews

“What exactly is wrong with the wealthy?” law professor John O. McGinnis asks in Why Democracy Needs The Rich. McGinnis thinks the 1 percent have been unfairly maligned by leftists like Bernie Sanders, and are in need of a vigorous defense. The rich, he says, are productive and useful members of society. If we redistribute their wealth, we only impoverish ourselves. Even those of us who will never be rich ourselves benefit from the presence of oligarchs.

Is this true? Do we all benefit from the riches possessed by billionaires? In fact, the arguments here are thin, and the opposite is true: we would all be much, much better off if we lived in a more egalitarian society that didn’t concentrate wealth at the top.

Before evaluating McGinnis’s substantive case, we should refresh ourselves on what we’re talking about when we discuss “the rich” in the United States today. In 2025, the wealthiest one percent of Americans held about $55 trillion in assets, about the same as the bottom 90 percent of Americans put together. This year’s World Inequality Report found that the richest one percent globally owned 37 percent of the wealth of the planet, while the poorest 50 percent, over 3 billion people, owned two percent.

According to Oxfam, between 1989 and 2022, a household in the top 0.1 percent would have gained approximately $40 million in wealth, while a household in the bottom 20 percent would have gained less than $8,500, with the top one percent gaining over 100 times more wealth than the median household. When we’re talking about billionaires, we’re talking about sums of money that are almost impossible to grasp. Families at the top struggle with which sprawling luxury estate to spend the next season in, which exclusive restaurant to have your household manager get a reservation for you tonight, and whether to fire that personal sommelier your kid’s getting too close to. Meanwhile, at the bottom, families struggle with medical debt, college is unaffordable, entry-level jobs are scarce, wages don’t cover even basic housing, and there is widespread homelessness.

Curiously, though, McGinnis spends little time with these core facts. Instead, the scope of his book is narrow, and he prefers to largely focus on the influence that wealthy people have over political and economic decision-making. Most of his book is a response to the claim that wealthy people have a disproportionate influence over the political process, undermining democracy. Interestingly, rather than dispute the idea that the wealthy have outsized influence, McGinnis concedes the point. Yes, he says, the opinions of the rich matter more to policy outcomes. And that’s a good thing. “Sometimes greater influence results in better policy,” he says.

McGinnis says that the question is “whether the rich harm or help society.” He concludes that they help in three core ways: one is through “counterbalancing” the outsized influence of other groups, another is by contributing to “dynamism” and innovation through investing in or running businesses, and the third is through philanthropy.

One might begin by asking who, precisely, he means by “the rich.” McGinnis says that “it is not essential to have a precise cutoff for what constitutes ‘the rich,’” but says we might talk about the top 0.1 percent, whose wealth starts at around $60 million. But McGinnis says it ultimately doesn’t really matter what threshold we pick, because he will argue that the richer people are, the more socially valuable they are. “While the top 5 percent certainly make significant contributions, the top 1 percent do more, and the top 0.1 percent even more. Wealth, in this sense, acts like a lever: The more there is, the greater the impact.” So if you thought that perhaps McGinnis would say that it’s good to have a class of wealthy people, but perhaps not a tiny set of oligarchical near-trillionaires, you’d be wrong. In fact, the people at the very top are the most helpful of all, making Elon Musk our most socially beneficial wealthy person.

The argument McGinnis leans on the most is that the wealthy “counterbalance” the power of special interest groups. McGinnis argues that we do not live in a democracy where everyone has an equal say, with the power of the rich (to influence politicians, to buy media) corrupting that...