“I still worry about bills,” I say, sadly. “And I get knots in my stomach when the tax is due. Really big knots. Have you worked out how to pay less tax like really rich people do?”

“No,” Ellen replies. “I pay forty-two percent.”

“Good,” I say.

•   •   •

FIVE TIMES Ellen is a man named Nick Hanauer. His taxable income is, he tells me, “tens of millions. In a bad year it can be ten million.” We speak via Skype. I’m in London. He’s at his home in Seattle. What little I can see of it looks lovely. He’s in some kind of an office/den with an electric guitar in the corner. His parents made good money from the pillow trade. After college he set up a few OK businesses, but then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, “You two are going to be friends.”

The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had in it—$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos and the business was Amazon.com.

Nick asks me about the woman beneath him on my income list. “Is Ellen a highly paid salary person?” he wonders.

“Yes,” I say.

“She has to go to work every day?”

“Right.”

“If she stops going to work, she’s out of business?”

“She has a bit of money saved, but basically yes,” I say.

Nick smiles. “While we sit here, during this charming conversation, I will make twenty-five thousand dollars,” he says.

I look at Nick. “That’s terrible,” I say.

Nick roars with laughter. “That’s the difference between me and her! Hahahaha!”

Nick has just been holidaying in Cabo. His life is ceaselessly luxurious, and always will be, because of one insanely clever realization—that Jeff Bezos was onto something—and the smart, subsequent ways he invested his Amazon profits.

“Ellen says she doesn’t want to be any richer because you’ve got problems,” I say. “People want to go on your plane. You fall asleep during conference calls.”

“Hahahaha!” Nick literally slaps his thigh. “People do want to come on my plane, and my wife and I make every effort to bring everyone we can.”

“How much tax did you pay last year?” I ask.

“Eleven percent,” says Nick.

“Do you feel awful about that?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Nick.

There’s something unusual about Nick, in that he’s come to believe that the system he benefits so richly from is built on nonsense—specifically the idea that “the markets are perfectly efficient, and allocate benefits and burdens perfectly efficiently, based on talent and merit. So by that definition the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor. We believe this because we have an almost insanely powerful need to self-justify.”

And the biggest nonsense of all, he says, “is the idea that because the rich are the smartest, and because we’re the job creators, the richer we get, the better it is for everyone. So taxes on the rich should be very, very low because we’re essentially the center of the economic universe, the font of productivity.” Nick pauses. “If there was a shred of truth to the claim that the rich are our nation’s job creators, then given how rich the rich have gotten, America should be drowning in jobs!”

“So if the rich don’t create the jobs,” I ask, “who does?”

“The middle classes!” Nick roars. “A huge middle class will produce an unbelievable opportunity for capitalists.”

I tell Nick about Rebecca and Dennis in Iowa, about how their health-insurance costs are preventing them from driving across the state to celebrate their anniversary, thus denying themselves happiness and small businesses across Iowa their money.

“I fly around in a twenty-five-million-dollar Falcon 2000,” he replies. “And they can’t afford to drive across the state to celebrate their anniversary? It’s not fair, and it’s terrible for business. The best ideas in the world aren’t worth jack shit unless you have someone to sell to.

“I don’t even know how much my health-care costs are,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter! For them it’s the difference between celebrating an anniversary and not celebrating an anniversary.”

The solution, Nick says, is to raise taxes for the rich. He says a 50 percent rate for people like him seems about right. It would pay for the likes of Dennis and Rebecca’s health care and enable them to drive across Iowa, creating jobs at whichever bed-and-breakfasts and gas stations and tourist attractions they happen to stop off at.

“If you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you write a check?” I ask.

“You can’t build a society around the effort of a few do-gooders,” he replies. “History shows that most people would not do it voluntarily. People have to be required to participate.”

So instead, he says, he’s dedicated his life to something more meaningful. He’s trying to persuade everyone he can—business journalists, etc.—that the system needs a radical change. He’s published a book about it: The Gardens of Democracy.

“The view that regulation is bad for business is almost universally held,” he says. “But in every country where you find prosperity you find massive amounts of regulation. Show me a libertarian paradise where nobody pays any taxes and nobody follows rules and everybody lives like a king! Show me one!”

•   •   •

AND SO I JOURNEY to a place where that libertarian ideal is imagined in a soft, warm glow: B. Wayne Hughes’s unassuming Malibu office. As it happens, Wayne is a substantial donor to Republican causes. For example, he has given $3.25 million to American Crossroads, a super PAC started by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie that pays for GOP campaign ads. You’ll see a lot of “Paid for by American Crossroads” tags on your TV in the coming months. But I didn’t know his politics when I approached him. My first inkling that his libertarian philosophy is practically spiritualist in its passion comes when he happens to mention some old novel from 1939 he likes.

“Read Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal,” he says. “It’ll tell you how to make your life a very satisfying thing. But it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with money.”

“Oh, OK, thanks, I will,” I reply politely. Then I instantly forget about it. The recommendation of a silly-sounding novel doesn’t seem at all relevant to my story. But later, just as I’m about to wind down the interview, a weird thing happens. It’s when I ask him if he has any advice for wannabe billionaires.

“I don’t know anything worth knowing,” he says. Then he pauses. A mischievous look crosses his face. “I gave you a secret in this interview already on how to make your life way better and you went right by it.”

I look at him, befuddled.

“Hahahahaha!” he says.

“Was it that thing you said about Mr. Hudson and the . . . ?” I say.

“Exactly right!” he roars. “Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. Read it! You’ll see!”

And so I order it from some secondhand-book place. It’s out of print. It arrives, ancient and battered. It’s kind of pulpy, the story of a Dr. Hudson who encounters a mysterious gravestone engraver named Randolph.

“I now have everything I want and can do anything I wish!” Randolph tells the doctor. “So can you! So can anybody! All you have to do is follow the rules!” Randolph hands Dr. Hudson a “magic page” upon which is written the secret, the rules for “generating that mysterious power I told you about . . .”

You can imagine how excited I am when I get to this part of the novel. But the secret turns out to be underwhelming. It is this: If you perform anonymous good deeds, greatness will visit you. But the philanthropy must be carried out with “absolute secrecy.” That’s the key.

When I read my B. Wayne Hughes transcript, I see that it’s peppered with covert references to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. When I asked him which charities he donates to, he said, “I have over the years supported charities.” Then he fell mysteriously silent. Then he said, “If you talk about things you’ve done that you think are worthwhile, you subtract from yourself. And so therefore I will only say my principal charity is children’s cancer and I’ve been doing it for twenty-two years.”