Democratism Blog

I’d like to broaden the discussion.

That $45 billion that Zuckerberg shifted from his personal account to his new limited liability company is a store of pure political power. It was his power before the shift; it’s still his afterwards. The same would be true if he’d created instead a private foundation a la Bill Gates. Yes, there are different tax implications and different limitations on how the money could be used, but the differences are more important to him than to us. I’d compare them to the differences in the kinds of weapons the military could buy. In 2015, the budget of the U.S. military includes $66 billion for new airplanes and ships and the systems that support them. For the people making the decisions, it’s important how much of that money goes to planes and how much to ships. Long after the planes and the ships are delivered, President Clinton or Rubio or Trump or Sanders will decide whether to bomb somewhere or invade, and she or he may ask, “How many planes do we have, and how many ships?” It’s a decision that makes a difference, but it’s not about morality or the ethical use of power. It’s a limited, practical kind of decision. That’s the kind of decision Zuckerberg made here.

We often lose track of this, I think, because we have an intuitive sense of what money is that doesn’t have much to do with money for a billionaire. For rich and poor alike, money—and technically I mean wealth, not just money—is a store of social power. You use it to get people to do things you want them to do—to give you a pizza, for example, or an iPhone, or root canal. The $450 million that Zuckerberg isn’t pledging, though (the 1% remainder from the 99% he pledged), is far more than he and his family could ever use to get people to do things that actually benefit the Zuckerberg family. The rest of all that power can only be for the Zuckerbergs to get people to do things that have nothing particularly to do with the Zuckerbergs. It doesn’t matter whether they keep it in their personal stock portfolio, move it to an LLC they own, or put it into a private foundation they control. In all these cases the Zuckerbergs will use it, if and when they do use it, to take control of other people’s lives, to further ends that they think are good, in satisfaction of their own ideals, or, perhaps, their whims. We can hope that they’ll exercise their enormous power with benevolence and wisdom. Maybe they will.

Of course, they could relinquish power by giving up control over the money. They could hand it over to the government. They could hand it over to organizations that they don’t control. The best choice would be to hand it over to a democratist organization that would put the money directly under the control of the people. Please have them shoot me an email if they want to knock that idea around.

People don’t usually give up power willingly, though, and we don’t have to wait for our billionaires to do it. Although we’ve taken to calling them oligarchs, that term exaggerates their authority and conceals our own responsibility. Our billionaires are more like renegade satraps. The power is in the people; we’ve just assigned too much of it to the few, and failed to supervise. We can demote them, we can reclaim our power, and we can decide together what kind of a society to be.

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