In 1588 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the villages of Japan to surrender their swords. The metal, he announced, would be made into nails and clamps for a colossal Buddha, so that the farmers might be spared in this life and the next. The Buddha was a courtesy. The purpose was to separate those permitted to carry weapons from those who were not, and the land surveys that accompanied the order did the rest, recording every plot against the name of the person who worked it. The four-class order the Tokugawa inherited and refined was drafted, surveyed and enforced. Its inhabitants were then taught to experience it as the natural arrangement of heaven and earth, which is the usual fate of a successful administrative design.
The more instructive case is a later one, because no one in it intended the result. In 1873 the Meiji government replaced the old rice levy with a land tax payable in cash, fixed by assessed value and owed regardless of the harvest. The purpose was a predictable budget for a state that had to buy warships, build railways and pay off a displaced warrior class. Title was granted to the registered holder. In a good year the arrangement was unremarkable. In a bad year a smallholder had to find cash he did not have, and the person who had it was usually a neighbor with surplus and a mortgage form. Within a generation something like forty-five percent of Japanese farmland was worked by tenants, many paying half the crop in rent. Nobody had decreed a landlord class. The rule produced one, and the rule was then kept in place by the people it enriched. The early franchise was tied to tax payment, and landlords sat in the Diet and in the prefectural assemblies where tenancy disputes were adjudicated. Tenant unrest grew for decades without altering the structure.
Then, between 1946 and 1950, the structure was dismantled in about four years. The state compelled landlords to sell at prices that postwar inflation reduced to almost nothing, and tenanted land fell to roughly a tenth of the total. The reform required a lost war and an occupying army, and that belongs in the record. It also shows that an arrangement which had presented itself as the condition of rural life was a set of legal instruments, and that those instruments could be rewritten when someone with the power to rewrite them chose to. Athens had made the same discovery in 594 BCE, when Solon cancelled debts that were turning citizens into bondsmen. The pattern is old enough that surprise is difficult to justify.
Now the present, which I approach with less confidence than the past, because the past has finished and the present has not. The World Inequality Lab's report of December 2025 puts about three-quarters of personal wealth in the hands of the top tenth of humanity, and the wealth of the top 0.001%, fewer than sixty thousand people, at roughly three times that of the bottom half. Federal Reserve accounts, as reported this month, show the richest one percent of American households holding about eighty-eight times the corporate equity of the bottom half. A claim that their share of net worth has reached a record is circulating, but I have not seen it in a primary table, and I hold it as a claim. The Congressional Budget Office adds a less tidy fact: the top fifth of households pay a higher average federal tax rate than the rest, about twenty-six percent against twenty-one. The same series has the top one percent's income growing nearly three hundred percent since 1979, and the middle's growing about sixty.
Those figures are all compatible. A progressive tax schedule can coexist with a distribution that widens, just as a uniform land tax could coexist with a countryside that sorted itself into owners and renters. The question is what the word "design" can honestly claim here. The authors of these reports say that the outcome is made by choices, institutions and power. Economists at the Council on Foreign Relations list technology and globalization beside policy, and they are not wrong to. The Meiji official could also have blamed the weather, since the harvests did fail. The weather decided only that someone would bear the loss. The rule decided who. I have found no document in this material that shows anyone intending the present distribution, and I doubt one exists. The Meiji case suggests it is not needed. The design lies in the maintenance: in which rules are reviewed, which are treated as fixtures, and who is in the room when the distinction is drawn.
That distinction is visible in the two ledgers currently being drawn up. The White House Council of Economic Advisers has priced eight Democratic Socialists of America policy proposals at $49 trillion over ten years, more than $350,000 per household. Senator Warren's bill, taxing household wealth above fifty million dollars, is credited by Saez and Zucman with $6.2 trillion over the same period, while other analysts estimate about $3.3 trillion for a different, Sanders-linked bill. These figures describe different measures and cannot be set against each other, and neither bill has an official score. What they share is a convention. Each prices the change, and the existing arrangement appears in neither as an entry. A ledger that lists only what an alteration would cost has already decided which arrangement is weather.
In France, Oxfam has chosen a stranger instrument: a formal request to the state, filed on the twelfth or thirteenth of October depending on the newspaper, alleging that the tax system breaches equality before taxation. If the state does not answer satisfactorily within two months, Oxfam says it will go to the Paris administrative court. Whether a court will agree that this is a matter it can examine, I cannot say. The claim itself is the notable thing. It asks a judge to treat the present distribution of burdens as a rule that someone enacted and someone could answer for.
The officials who drafted the land tax regulations of 1873 wanted a predictable budget. They got one.