The richest people in the world have more to lose from disorder than anyone. They have the most property, the most complex legal structures protecting it, the deepest interest in enforceable contracts and functioning courts. By any straightforward logic, they should be the most committed defenders of stable institutions and predictable governance.

They are not. The reason isn’t greed, or not primarily. It is something both more mundane and more intractable: it is how the system is built.

Extreme wealth, at the levels we are discussing, is not really a quantity. It is a capability: the capability to move fast, to hold options, to convert assets across time and geography in ways unavailable to anyone operating with less capital. A pension fund is slow. A small investor is constrained. A working family’s primary asset is their labour, which is geographically fixed and entirely non-diversifiable.

The ultra-rich face none of these constraints. And this matters the moment the world becomes uncertain, because options are most valuable precisely when the future is most unclear. Uncertainty is, structurally, a gift to anyone with sufficient optionality. And optionality is what extreme wealth is.

The machinery by which instability converts into wealth concentration runs through three mechanisms.

The first is crisis acquisition. When asset prices collapse, those with capital can buy. The 2008 financial crisis is the most instructive example. Ordinary households lost jobs, homes, and pension savings. When quantitative easing flooded the system with cheap money, asset prices inflated dramatically. Those who owned assets got richer. Those whose primary asset was their labour got stagnant wages and a decade of austerity. Covid-19 repeated the pattern almost exactly.

The second is regulatory capture. The carried interest loophole, which allows private equity managers to pay capital gains rates on what is functionally income, has survived decades of attempted reform despite being indefensible on any principled basis. In the UK, the non-dom regime persisted for generations. These are not accidents. They are the product of sustained, well-resourced lobbying by people with a direct financial interest in the outcome.

The third is jurisdictional arbitrage. Capital is effectively stateless at the most extreme levels. When a country raises taxes or tightens regulations, capital moves: to offshore financial centres, complex trust structures, alternative jurisdictions. The ultra-wealthy can, in a meaningful sense, exit. Everyone else cannot. This severs the connection between contribution and consequence that makes social contracts function. For those who can exit, instability in one jurisdiction is simply an opportunity to relocate. The incentive to invest in stability, to support the institutions that create it, is structurally weaker when you are never fully bound by the consequences of their failure.

The short-term case for tolerating instability is genuinely rational for the ultra-rich. Crisis creates buying opportunities. Political volatility suppresses tax ambitions. A world in mild, chronic disorder, turbulent enough to generate dislocations from which capital profits but never catastrophic enough to threaten the infrastructure of commerce, would be close to optimal on a short enough time horizon. No conspiracy is required. The incentive structures are sufficient.

And yet the history of extreme inequality is also the history of the institutional decay that extreme inequality eventually produces. Extreme wealth depends on the rule of law, on political legitimacy, and on the kind of broad-based consumption that only a reasonably paid working population can sustain. When wealth concentration becomes sufficiently extreme, it degrades all three. Populations correctly perceive that political outcomes reflect donor preferences rather than voter preferences. That perception generates populist rage that does not reliably distinguish between targeted reform and wholesale dismantling. Property rights are social constructs maintained by institutional consensus. When that consensus breaks down, the protection institutions provide can disappear faster than any financial model predicts. The ultra-wealthy of Weimar Germany discovered this. So did those of revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia.

The New Deal stabilised a system at genuine risk of collapse. The post-war settlement confirmed the same pattern: the highest sustained rates of economic growth in recorded history occurred under conditions of compressed inequality and robust public institutions.

You are, by rational short-term calculation, underinvesting in the institutional infrastructure that makes your wealth possible. You are extracting from systems you are not adequately maintaining. This is rational in the way that eating your seed corn is rational: it solves the immediate problem while guaranteeing a catastrophic one in the future.

Progressive wealth taxation is not primarily a moral instrument. It is a maintenance fee for the infrastructure that makes wealth possible. You can be as indifferent to justice as you like. You cannot be indifferent to that.

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.