Look closely at two of this week’s major stories, and you will find a connection. The looters in Paris and the backers of Proposition 40 in California may have different motives, but they both illustrate how much easier it is to take from businesses than to build what businesses make possible. One group spoliates corner shops illegally. The other wants to spoliate big business legally. In both cases, someone’s property becomes a means to an end, either for personal gain or for a stated public good.
I say this without questioning anyone’s motives. We do not need to be cynical about it. Beneath their discontent with modern civilization lies the first problem, the problem of knowledge. The premodern world was legible. You knew how your neighbor made a living, because he reaped what he had sown. Inequality was stark and easy to trace, usually to inheritance and upbringing. The modern world is not like that. It is far less legible, because it depends on multitudes cooperating to accomplish together what no one could accomplish alone.
Building is hard, complex, opaque, and distributed. Damaging requires far less knowledge. And in your own moral narrative, a lack of knowledge about how the world works is easily replaced by an excess of intention to fix it.
That is the second problem: the morality of intentionality. We tend to judge whether an action serves humanity by how loudly it declares that it does. The ordinary cooperation that actually serves vast numbers of people is far harder to recognize as a moral achievement. Even businesses that add real value to our lives feel obliged to keep a second line of values and activities to convince us that they are trying to improve the world.
Anyone in Paris or California who announces an intention to change the world through spoliation is offering a story in a format we understand instantly. There is a protagonist, a problem to be solved, a dramatic act with a moral purpose. The granular stories of millions of people engaged in reciprocal agency, each with different purposes and no shared declaration of virtue, cannot compete with that. And yet that kind of cooperation does far more for people its participants will never meet.
We recognize the moral ambition of those who would take someone’s property for a higher end. We have a harder time seeing the civic virtue of someone who improves society by running a business that makes it more efficient, by saving and thereby expanding the supply of credit, or by educating their children and thereby adding to our stock of human capital.
The gap between burning a building and the outcome the arsonist says he wants reveals how a stated purpose is not a theory of change, even when it is sincere. Sincerity is no replacement for a causal account of how the act produces the end.
Modern civilization emerges from countless acts between people who pursue their own ends and share little beyond the understanding that allows their exchanges to happen. That understanding is fragile, and its fragility is hard to convey. This week offers a lesson.
FEE Visiting Fellow Vincent Geloso has compared the problem of deterring riots in France to a fractional reserve bank facing a run. Neither the police nor the bank keeps enough capacity on hand to serve everyone who might demand it at once. Both operate with leverage. So does our system of justice, which depends on not everyone litigating against everyone else at the same time. Whatever the merits of these different arrangements, they illustrate the enormous importance of shared expectations. Civilization functions because our expectations of one another do not require universal enforcement and supervision.
This is what connects complexity to expectations. Much of the modern world depends on giving other people reasons to act, and reasons to trust that we will act as expected. Which brings me to Proposition 40, California’s proposed one-time tax of 5% on the net worth of billionaires who were residents of the state on January 1, 2026.
The public debate has been about what the tax would raise against what it would cost. Two economists at Hoover tried to estimate the cost by modeling how the people targeted would respond. Because billionaires can move to other states, taking their income tax payments with them, the authors conclude that the wealth tax would leave California with a net revenue loss whose present value is $38.9 billion. We can dispute the number and the assumptions behind it. The logic is harder to dispute. Billionaires have the resources to take their businesses and their tax dollars somewhere else.
The counterargument comes from Gabriel Zucman, perhaps the most influential economist behind the proposal. Yes, he says, that would happen if the tax recurred. But this one is written as a one-time levy.
Calling a policy one-time does not give it one-time consequences. People learn from what governments do, and they change their expectations about what will happen during the next emergency or the next politically convenient exception. They do not need to expect the same tax to internalize the higher probability of another intervention in the future. That may be enough to change where they live and what they build, or how far into the future they are willing to plan.
These are the problems a thick education in economics, and in its civics, has to teach: the problem of knowledge, the invisibility of coordination, the visibility of intentionality, the fragility of social order, the leverage of public order, and the formation of expectations. There is a reason economics should be taught with a civic component and civics with an economic one. We forget to see the civic virtue in modern economic civilization because it never presents itself as such.
Fixing the world usually looks like giving someone else a future he or she can reasonably count on. A world where promises are kept, children are taught, trades are learned, debts are repaid, and businesses are built. These acts are not usually performed in front of an audience, and their authors are not aware of how far their consequences will end up reaching. But we should learn to recognize their achievement before its absence becomes a spectacle.
