but all the dubious ways the rich got richer

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To start with an easy category, wealth obtained by deceit is illegitimate. For example, given the way tobacco companies lied about the dangers of smoking,the gigantic legal judgments against them seem appropriate (though it is too bad how big a share of that money went into the pockets of lawyers). And although the magnitude of the crime might not be as great, GM’s recently outed behavior in hiding problems with ignition switches has a disturbing resonance with the earlier behavior of the tobacco companies. As these examples make clear, standard legal principles often make it possible to take away wealth obtained by deceit once that deceit is well established. But a greater hatred of deceit on the part of juries, judges, and legislators would help in further neutralizing this form of wealth.

If undeserved wealth always arose in cases where the logic was as simple as that for deceit, and were similarly reprehensible from a criminal or civil law point of view, then the issue of undeserved wealth could be appropriately handled in the courts.In an IMF paper, Harvard Economics professor Michael Kremer and Northwestern University Economics professor Seema Jayachandran make the intriguing proposal that debt incurred by a non-democratic government (after the appropriate international organization has declared that the debt is not in the interests of the people of a country) should be considered “odious debt” that later (and hopefully better) governments of that country need not pay back.