Aidan Regan: Global tax games fuel wealth inequality and erode democracy

One of the biggest threats to democracy is extreme wealth inequality. Concentrated wealth is economic power, which can be translated into political power. When this happens, as we see in Russia and increasingly in the United States, it fuels economic polarisation and undermines the conditions for democracy.

This observation underpins the political theory of John Rawls, the American philosopher, and has heavily influenced the trajectory of liberal democratic thinking. Rawls’s “difference principle” states that only ...