Any economy depends on people contributing to provisioning as well as consuming what has been provided. Not everyone is able to contribute but everyone needs to consume to live. Those who can contribute – whether farming, producing machines or software, delivering products, teaching, training, caring and so on - usually don’t mind supporting at least some others who are unable to work, certainly if they are their loved ones or part of their community, and sometimes beyond too. But some people can get an income by extracting wealth from the economy simply through their control of key resources that others need but lack, and by charging them for their use.

As we’ll see, this is the key to the exceptional wealth of the rich. Access to mechanisms of wealth extraction, rather than wealth creation, is what marks them out. To understand why we can’t afford the rich, we need to look into how this is done. Part One examines the main methods of wealth extraction.

But it so happens that the very vocabulary we use to describe and understand economic practices in our economy is systematically misleading. Even simple words like ‘earnings’ and ‘investment’ are dangerously ambiguous and conceal a great deal. We need to open up how these simple terms are used, so as to guard against mystification. And we also need to revive a distinction that used to be part of our economic vocabularies: between earned and unearned income. Chapters Two and Three explain these matters. Only when we’ve done this can we understand wealth extraction in all its guises.

The classic big three mechanisms of wealth extraction are rent, interest and profit from ownership of enterprises, but there are other, less obvious ones. The remaining chapters in Part One deal with these in turn, except for the last chapter, Chapter Eight, which answers some of the most common objections in defence of the rich, such as the claim that they create jobs and are special, entrepreneurial, innovative and hence deserving people, and that their wealth benefits others by ‘trickling down’. It also answers the most likely objections to come from mainstream economists.