Lets face it, we live in a money world. A “cash rules everything around me” world. We are all chasing it, and yet we are mostly frustrated or aggrieved on some level by its seemingly all encompassing power to dictate the parameters of our world, especially for the majority of us who don’t possess much of it.
Just recently, a certain individual, lets call him Mike Bloomberg, the ninth richest person in the whole damn world, decided rather impulsively to run for president, or more accurately, decided to allow his money to run for president.
Lets back up a second. I’m not really here to talk about Bloomberg perse. Its not clear yet that one can simply purchase the presidency of the United States via ones own personal pile of loot, even if you are as rich as Michael Bloomberg. It is true there are other factors in play beside money alone. But money is clearly the primary factor, and no one is debating the fact that without these unprecedented self-expenditures on his campaign, there would be no Bloomberg candidacy of any seriousness.
If it’s about the money lets start with the basic question — what is money, actually? Economists will say — a store of value. I have a similar, but slightly different and in my view more useful definition — money is stored energy. When you “spend” money, you release that energy into the world, activating its potential and making it kinetic. So when Bloomberg spends 300 million of his own dollars on a campaign, all sorts of people jump to attention and devote their energy to his personal aims, given that he alone directs the expenditures of his great fortune. In this, he is not unlike a magic wizard wielding a money wand, motivating vast armies of people to expend their own energies at his personal whim. Some of these people may share his aims. Most simply want to pay their mortgage or put their kids thru college, no minor matters. Thus, he has no trouble effortlessly and instantly staffing his campaign with every manner of skilled professional and consultant. The brutal magic of infinite cash piles is a thing to behold.
So, well illustrated by this particularly outrageous example, the actual problem with money is what it is possible to do with lots of it. Money alone can create from thin air a political power without politics. A shortcut only available to the money-powerful, perhaps best described as the magic money wand.
You may have come about your money wand through a lifetime of hard work, through clever innovation, through dumb luck, through utter ruthlessness, or more likely some combination of all of the above. However you have come to possess your pile, it nonetheless should be clear that the mere presence of a large pile does not convey any particular entitlement to dictate anything to anyone, outside of any specific enterprises which you may control. Should be clear — but of course, this is not a sentiment shared by those who possess piles, who will cite any manner of entitlements to all manner of things as a consequence merely of their fiscal success, up to and including the right to be President of the United States apparently. Great wealth will never run out of cleverly stated rationalizations to justify the purchase of almost unlimited power and influence, in America in particular such rationalizations have always formed a veritable bottomless pit. No shame in any plutocrats game, ever.
I have been calling this phenomenon “money power”, the reason I prefer to use this term is to maintain it as a distinct concept from simply the existence of wealth perse. Its the aspect of the money problem I believe we can and must do something about in the foreseeable future, while the very existence of wealth is a much deeper structural question that is currently well outside the scope of achievable politics.
Buying a mcmansion is different from buying a politician, or a whole political party for that matter. Simple riches gets you a rather limited form of power — purchasing power of the consumer sort. Bigger houses, bigger boats. Great riches can get you something else entirely — real power over other peoples lives who otherwise have nothing to do with you. It is one thing to be just rich, and it is another thing to be rich AND powerful. If we want to make our nation effectively democratic in any meaningful sense of the word, we first have to get really for real about the problem of what you are permitted to do with your money, but more importantly what you are not. This is what one might call a first order problem, and by that I mean it is the one singular problem that is cockblocking the will of the people at large from being fully expressed on any range of urgent issues.
Some want to approach this issue head on by eliminating or greatly limiting extreme wealth aka the Billionaire class. It makes sense on some basic level — you cant wield money power if you don’t have that money in the first place. The usual idea here is that the gov can tax away wealth over a certain threshold, affecting a relatively small number of very high net worth individuals.
But there are a number of difficulties with this approach outside of its obvious feel good appeal to all of us non billionaires. First, even assuming it would work, simply taking money from big personal piles via taxes and putting it in the governments pile may just move the money from peter to paul. Corruption is real. Congress (the appropriators of federal monies) is not exactly to be trusted. Money could move from the oil magnate to lockheed. You’d just get different rich people, not less rich people.
Second, it has proven very difficult to make high tax rates work on a practical basis, because rich folk will hire lawyers and accountants to find loopholes, and really rich folk will hire even better lawyers and accountants. And there are always loopholes. In fact, not only do rich people not become less rich, but previous such efforts have actually reduced tax revenues, instead of increasing them, as rich folk move their money offshore, or vest more of it in tax shelters.
Third, the entire moneyed class will unite to push back on this, and they will do so with the tacit support of a good chunk of the populace, because Americans have never really trusted their government when it comes to taxation. The feeling may be — grab that guys big pile today, take my smaller pile tomorrow.
So leaving aside simple wealth grabs, there are two other approaches left to employ, the first being the shrinking of the boundaries of what money power can achieve, and the second being equalizing/countering the influence of money power by empowering the non wealthy with other forms of power.
In theory, these two approaches ARE being used, the problem is that all the current approaches to limiting money power are hamstrung in various ways and are continuously being undermined by the very rich, who have been winning that fight for a long time, via a vicious cycle in which each victory reinforces their power to obtain more and deeper victories.
It is long overdue to adjust tactics and take a more aggressive approach. We are not going to fix a rigged game by continuing to play the same game. I don’t mean veering towards the sort of grim totalitarianism that the right imagines is the ultimate plan of the left, I mean we have to get directly at the myriad loopholes in our legal and regulatory systems that permit money power to prevail at nearly every turn. We have to break the catch-22 of requiring money to go out of politics so that the political will exists to take money out of politics.
We may not be able to avoid addressing this thorny issue of free speech and how its been interpreted by the courts to favor the speech of the wealthy. Which may ultimately require changes to the constitution to fully settle the question, as difficult as this has been to achieve historically. You as an individual should always have protected political speech, but not your money. One person buying fifty million fb impressions for a political ad is not “free speech”, its money speech. Money speech is in fact the opposite of free — because its only an option for the tiny subset of the populace that can afford it. For a long time, the law has needed to catch up to the modern world of mass media, where too often the formula is: speech * dollars = impact.
Finally, there can be a another element to countering traditional money power beside the oft stated “getting money out of politics” aspect. One that can arguably have just as much impact.
I am talking about “investment” writ large, that is, the part of the economy that determines all future activity that is a consequence of money (energy) being deployed, whether its source is wealthy individuals or business. Private investment dwarfs public investment in this country — so we are talking about a vast pile of loot that collectively determines much of the shape of our immediate world. Investment is all about choices. Who and what. Who makes the choices and what businesses get started, what buildings get built, what developments get developed (or not), and so on.
Investment choices are traditionally made based on the perception by investors that they will result in return on investment sometime in the future. Capitalism seeks returns for capitalists as its prime directive, so this is not surprising. But for the common good of the citizens, it should be recognized that the idea of “return” can come in myriad other forms than just $, for example preservation of the environment, or improved public health, or more affordable housing, or any number of other obvious socially positive outcomes.
Government can spend money directly on such social goods of course, and they should. But given the impact of investment it is worthwhile to consider alternatives to the currently dominant model based fully on $ returns. An alternative wherein some investments could add to social good but still make money in the traditional sense, while others might return little or no money but create significant returns on alternative vectors of benefit.
I am talking about a public investment fund, that in some ways looks like a traditional investment fund, but is funded by a combination of small donor investments and the government, but run independently from government structures, sort of like a peoples fed (disclosure: I worked on schemes such as this for a previous employer).
Thorny yet urgent problems like affordable housing in urban areas cannot easily be addressed directly by local governments, or by business investment that is typically going to gravitate to the highest returns with any regard other than lip service to larger social benefit.
A publicly owned well funded investment entity that was charged with balancing monetary returns with socially positive outcomes could operate more effectively at scale outside of the usual (and usually dysfunctional) political structures. Its silly to get into particulars of how this would work here, its a long discussion, the point rather is to introduce the concept generally and to make the point that creativity is required to address difficult problems in new ways.
Critically, we need to fully acknowledge the true role of money power in a money world, and in some cases quite substantially clip its wings, and in others, redeploy that power in such a way where it does a much better job for society as a whole.
It is also nigh to acknowledge the deep limitations of molasses slow incrementalism within the current status quo and risk aversion weighted political paradigm and seek to overcome these limitations aggressively.
We simply need to start trying more things.
Given the playing field as it exists, I am comfortable stating the radical is what’s practical. Act, and vote, accordingly.