Don’t Eat the Rich. Just Tax Them Until They're Tender
Or let them eat themselves.
Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.
In every dying empire, the rich throw one last party before the devil comes to collect, or as Louis XIV apocryphally said, Après moi, le délugee (After me, the flood.)
The Romans held their last hurrah in marble villas, sipping wine sweetened with lead while the plebs starved outside the city walls. Before the fall, a Roman senator earned 120,000 gold coins a year, while a farmer earned five. When the grain ran out, they paid poets to praise their generosity and fed their pet eels on the flesh of slaves.
Centuries later, the Medici family outdid them. Florence glowed with lavish parties, frescoes, and debt. At one banquet, they painted a servant boy head-to-toe in gold to celebrate the family’s wealth. (He suffocated and died before dessert.)
By the eighteenth century, the French perfected the art of ostentation. Versailles sparkled while Paris starved. Nobles powdered their wigs with flour while peasants fought for bread crumbs. Half the nation’s tax revenue went to keep the monarch’s mirrors polished.
Russia’s tale is no different. Catherine the Great dined off solid silver while her serfs froze to death in fields they’d never own. During long winters, the Empress traveled in what one historian described as a “palace on runners” — a sleigh with a salon, library, and bedroom, each warmed by porcelain stoves. Later, the Tsar Nicholas II’s wine cellar had 40,000 bottles, while peasants drank rainwater to survive. On the eve of revolution, one percent of the population held noble titles and enormous tracts of land, while most peasants lived one bad harvest away from starvation.
Sound familiar? Every era thinks it’s too civilized for collapse.
America, of course, has given the old greed a modern twist. Today, our elites still waltz at the edge of ruin, but now they do it under LED chandeliers and hashtags.
Recently, Donald Trump hosted a “Great Gatsby” party at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering so tasteless that even Louis XIV would’ve called it “a bit much.” Guests swanned through the ballroom in sequined flapper dresses, waiters floated by with silver trays of oysters, and a half-naked dancer lounged in an oversized martini glass. The theme, in case irony needed a headstone, was “A little party never killed nobody.” (Funny, I remember someone dying in that novel.)
But if there’s a soundtrack to America’s collapse, it’s the sound of shrimp cocktail forks clinking while the poor skip dinner. The hypocrisy tastes bittersweet. Outside the palace gates, children went to bed hungry as 42 million Americans lost SNAP benefits. Inside, the only starvation was for attention.
It wasn’t a party; it was a séance for empathy.
Of course, pundits rushed to call it “Gatsby-esque.” And yes, there were feathers, jazz, and the grand illusion of self-creation. But that comparison gives Trump far too much grace. Jay Gatsby was a self-made billionaire and an incurable dreamer. His tragedy was hope.
Trump’s tragedy is a different kind of hunger — an insatiable appetite for adoration, gold, and grievance. He’s not Gatsby reaching toward Daisy’s green light; he’s Tom Buchanan retreating into wealth and letting others clean up the wreckage.
And yet, even Fitzgerald’s villains feel too romantic for Trump’s crowd. What we’re watching isn’t longing — it’s decay disguised as celebration. If you want a closer literary ancestor, look not to Fitzgerald, but to Edgar Allan Poe.
In The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero barricades himself and his courtiers inside an opulent abbey while the plague ravages the countryside. They fill their bedazzled fortress with music, velvet, and wine, believing their wealth can buy immunity. As the dying wail beyond the walls, the rich party on.
But the Red Death finds a way in. It always does. When the clock tolls midnight, the music stops, the dancers freeze, and the prestilence they were trying to ignore walks in, wearing a mask of their own making.
That’s where America’s billionaire class is now — inside the masquerade. Every tax loophole, every deregulation, every “AI productivity” myth is another brick in the wall meant to keep the nation’s suffering out. But the walls are paper. You can hear the coughing through them.
They say money can’t buy happiness. Not exactly. Money can’t buy insulation.
Money only buys amnesia.
It lets you forget that your kids don’t call, that your megayacht doesn’t buy respect, that your mistress is on payroll. It lets a man build a $300 million ballroom/bunker and call it leadership while the nation wheezes outside his gates.
Trump’s world doesn’t want. It consumes. It’s not romance; it’s rot.
How to “Eat the Rich” — The Original Recipe
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. By 1789, the French aristocracy controlled nearly all of the nation’s wealth, while nine out of ten citizens lived in hunger. The revolution didn’t start because people hated the rich — it started because they were tired of starving politely.
In Rome, it ended with the Visigoths marching through the gates.
In Italy, it ended with bankrupt princes and mercenary wars.
In France, it ended in guillotines.
In Russia, it ended with palaces ransacked and the tsar’s family shot in a basement.
In America, it ends with stock tickers rising while food banks run dry.
But here’s the existentialist dread that Trump and his rich buddies don’t see coming: in the modern era, the poor don’t need to eat the rich — the rich are already devouring themselves. They feed on speculation, monopolies, and each other’s failures. They buy politicians the way their ancestors bought portraits.
The rich gorge until they can no longer swallow their own reflection.
The Vomitorium
Since Reagan, productivity has leapt more than 60 percent, while real wages have barely twitched, and union power has withered from one in three workers to barely one in ten. Between 1979 and 2010, the income of the top 1 percent tripled.
Deregulate, cut taxes, deregulate again — that’s the ritual chant. The result? CEOs now make 344 times what their workers earn, the fattest pay gap since record-keeping began. Meanwhile, nearly half of U.S. workers scrape by on less than $35,000 a year, while billionaires added $2 trillion to their fortunes during the pandemic.
Even the middle class — that once-sturdy stomach lining of democracy — is dissolving. In 1971, 61% of Americans qualified as middle-income; now it’s barely 50. The missing share didn’t vanish — it congealed at the top, where it sits like Trump’s cholesterol.
Costs continue to rise. Health care devours nearly a fifth of our GDP, about $14,500 per person each year. Food prices are up more than 25 percent since 2020. In most major cities, rent gulps half a paycheck before groceries even hit the cart. The crisis isn’t scarcity; it’s gluttony.
The Cure for Indigestion
History has one proven antacid for inequality: tax the rich.
Between 1930 and 1970, during what economists dubbed “The Great Compression,” inequality shrank — at least for white Americans. (Black Americans, as usual, were told to wait for the next prosperity train that never came.)
How did it happen?
Not by chance — by taxation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies dragged the top marginal tax rate as high as 94%. He didn’t just regulate industry or create jobs; he rebalanced appetite. He established a minimum wage, empowered unions, and taxed wealth as if it were a public utility.
He ate the rich.
And it worked. Between 1925 and 1950, the number of American millionaires fell from roughly 1,600 to fewer than 900.
The result wasn’t ruin — it was a boom. The highways, the GI Bill, the suburbs (for better and worse) — all paid for by siphoning excess from the top to build a floor for everyone else. The rich survived. Some even discovered that a nation of consumers with money to spend was good for business.
Now comes Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, accused of being a communist by the right for suggesting the same math: a Social Housing Development Agency funded by millionaire and corporate taxes. The one-percenters shriek apocalypse, but Mamdani is just reading FDR’s playbook.
Because here’s what FDR understood: you can’t have it both ways. You either tax the rich or you shrink the middle class.
The Final Course
In The Masque of the Red Death, Poe’s Prince Prospero believes he can wall himself off from plague, poverty, and decay — but his denial is the contagion. The more he hides, the sicker his kingdom becomes.
Trump’s world runs on the same gaslighting. He believes that if he denies reality loudly enough — climate change, his felony charges, grocery prices, a weak job market, the Epstein files — he’ll remain immortal. His courtiers amplify the “Big Lie,” mistaking denial for power. Poe would see this as a form of spiritual decomposition: the corpse pretending it’s still dancing.
But let’s be clear. The Red Death doesn’t come to kill — it comes to unmask. In the final scene, the figure drops the veil of deceit, and there’s nothing underneath. Poe’s terror isn’t that death wins; it’s that there was never anyone real there to begin with.
That’s Trumpism: remove the mask of populism, and there’s no ideology, no soul, just performance. When the lies and bluster are gone, all that remains is the void.
The elite think their bunkers, stocks, and private islands will save them. But sealed walls won’t keep their downfall out; they lock it in. The plague enters because it was already inside them.
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Excellent writing. Thank you!
The best I've read in years.