It was a lunch break during the summer of 2013. At the top of a tower in downtown Athens, Morris Pearl approached the dessert tray. He was one of the managing directors at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and his team had been commissioned to assess the health of Greek banks. "I glanced out the window and saw a huge crowd on the street," he recounted during a recent video call from his New York office. "When I realized they were Greeks made desperate by austerity, I looked at the well-fed bankers around me: What exactly are we doing for the good of this country?"
A few months later, he resigned and joined the Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of 250 Americans whose annual income exceeds $1 million (around €950,000), or whose assets are worth more than $5 million. "The rich aren't all greedy: We want the world to be a better place, and that will only be possible if people like me pay more taxes."
Gary Stevenson was a trader in London between 2008 and 2012. In 2010, aged just 23, he earned his first million euros: He was Citibank's rising star. "I became a multimillionaire by betting that interest rates wouldn't rise and that inequality would explode," Stevenson confessed. In 2014, he quit his job in disgust and went back to studying economics. Now, he shoots YouTube videos, where he explains why the financial system is wiping out the middle class, and supports the Patriotic Millionaires. "I've earned enough not to work for the rest of my life. Taxation should target the wealthy, of which I'm one, to redistribute wealth."
Millionaires demanding to pay higher taxes? It may seem incongruous, but there are more and more of them in the United States, Canada and Europe – but hardly any in France. They form associations such as Patriotic Millionaires, Millionaires for Humanity, Ressources en Mouvement in Quebec, Resource Generation in the US and Tax Me Now in Germany.
They're all asking for the same thing: "I want to pay as much tax as everyone else so that society doesn't implode," said 71-year-old Brit Phil White, who became rich by selling his consulting company a few years ago. "Me too! It's the very wealthy like us who should be paying a real wealth tax – which, incidentally, they'd hardly feel – and not middle-class doctors or engineers," insisted Stefanie Bremer, a German heiress who campaigns under a pseudonym, since her family doesn't necessarily share her ideas.
"I was taxed more on my income as a professor than I am now because I receive dividends: It's not normal!" said Claire Trottier. In 2021, this young woman from Quebec left her position at McGill University in Montreal to devote herself to the Trottier Family Foundation, created by her parents – her father Lorne made his fortune in high technology.
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