Long's $50 million wealth limit, adjusted for inflation, would be about $850 million today still more than anyone could spend in a lifetime.
Rather, it was a prosperity produced by freeing America's poor from a punitive welfare system, lowering tariffs, reducing tax rates on the creators of wealth, limiting the growth of federal government expenditures, and providing a strong and stable dollar to businesses and families in America and throughout the world.
Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people.
However, other things like future value destruction from environmental damage and wealth creation limits imposed by ecosystem decline or the effects of excessive income inequality on consumer demand and political risk also raise impartiality concerns.
The Sesync study lends credence to an argument I've also made frequently - that at the core of our current civilisational model is a dramatic inequality in access to the Earth's resources, coupled with an ideology which sees those resources as nothing more than a playing field for a minority of members of the human species to accumulate material wealth without limits.
But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets.
There's no limit to the money accumulating at the top of New York (and other centers of wealth), no limit to the fascination it exercises over the rest of the country.
With stock prices going sideways in recent months, or falling in the high-technology sector, consumers no longer feel as confident about their wealth and limit their spending.
It says, "our bespoke high-quality tax advice and support … will help reduce tax, protect wealth and limit the risk of non-compliance", through a "discreet, personal service that will help you solve tax issues".
The "who's on your side" issue will work to Democrats' advantage whether Republicans nominate a career politician whose wealth is limited (which describes many of the 2016 GOP contenders) or whether they nominate Scrooge McDuck.
My greatest concern is the malevolent power of those among the superrich who, striving to amass wealth without limit, tilt the playing field to transfer wealth to themselves at the expense of everyone else.
