The Superrich Endanger Democracy

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-05/kapitalismus-demokratie-ungleichheit-globalisierung-english/komplettansicht

by ericdanielski • 7 years ago

121 64 7 years ago

zeit.de

Hendrikto• 7 years ago

The link to the German version 404s. Very strange.

sschueller• 7 years ago

I can't find it either. I think it doesn't exist in German.

tannhaeuser3• 7 years ago

It's here: https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-04/kapitalismus-demokrat...

Though TFA was originally written in English, so if you're on HN you'll want to read the original anyway.

wnkrshm• 7 years ago

It's just an error on their part with the link, the article exists:

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-04/kapitalismus-demokrat...

jaabe• 7 years ago

In Denmark we have a fairly recent political party called Liberal Alliance. They were funded by billionaire, bank owner and businessman Lars Seier Christensen for almost 10 years and at their height achieved 7% of the votes and a spot in our government. At some point Lars Seiers brother founded a political party and Liberal Alliance fell out of favour with the billionaire.

In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.

Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.

lotsofpulp2• 7 years ago

Root of the problem is the lack of inclination/resources for average person to participate in the democracy as much as a focused entity, especially one who doesn’t need to worry about putting food on the table everyday.

Many people I’ve met are completely apathetic of their voting powers. They don’t want to read current events, research candidates, go to town meetings, and work to inform fellow voters. On the other hand, many people are also burned out from going to work, getting kids ready, making dinner, putting them to bed, working 80 hours a week, etc. And they may not have the cognitive abilities to analyze data to figure out what is true and false.

Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?

baybal23• 7 years ago

Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?

Democracy relies on level headed people doing politics.

baybal23• 7 years ago

What about doing politics yourself?

Want power? — cling to men with more power.

My advice, drop in onto their caucus and start talking something big. Dress smartly. Make an impression of you being a "big man."

Believe me, it works.

I was a complete nobody on a work visa in Canada, yet I crashed on nearly every caucus party Christy Clarke had over 6 years I was there, and was making sure to make big fuzz with my appearance every time.

Svip• 7 years ago

Speaking of LA, according to Politiken,[0] their leadership believes their terrible showing in the polls is partly due to a lack of financial support by the Danish industry at large. Specifically, they mention that LA got 3 million DKK less in support this election compared to 2015.

So maybe money does work? Or perhaps the LA's leadership is focusing on exactly the wrong reasons?

[0] https://politiken.dk/indland/politik/FV19/art7244111/Erhverv...

KozmoNau73• 7 years ago

I believe their main problem has not been funding, but rather a clash of very strong-willed individualistic people in the party, people who all desire to be The Man/Woman In Charge, above all.

That tends to create a lot of internal friction, which became very obvious as the election results rolled in, and they all started backtalking each other and pointing fingers.

Maybe it's obvious, but LA is a political party I intensely disagree with. In my perspective, if they want to stand a chance in the next election, they need to do some serious restructuring, otherwise the internal friction will end them.

sneak3• 7 years ago

Why is this a bad thing? Is the implicit assumption here that the electorate is primarily mindless, and that things like advertising or facebook or fake news or russian ad buying is all it takes to directly translate from dollars (or euro or rubles) to votes?

It seems to me to run counter to the democratic idea that an individual’s opinion matters. Either individuals are good at forming their own opinions from the world and voting is the practical realization of that into a government, or the electorate is an unthinking blob to be managed, as it will only vote for that for which it has been sufficiently inundated with propaganda, in which case the whole election is somewhat of a farce to begin with.

Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?

lumberjack• 7 years ago

Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, including you and me. Democracy is based on information, so if you mess with that information, you can most definitely have a noticeable effect. The propagandists exploit the asymmetry of resources and time between them and you. They can lie easily, they have all the time and money to craft careful lies. You don't have all the time and money and domain knowledge to figure out each and every one of their carefully crafted lies. Not to mention other more sinister tactics like tracking you, finding out your biases and using them against you with targeted propaganda campaigns.

CaptainZapp• 7 years ago

It seems to me to run counter to the democratic idea that an individual’s opinion matters.

I would agree with you, if we wouldn't live in a day and age where facts are relative and truth is completely malleable.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?

Because some people don’t like the implications of what the public wants. Around the west you’re seeing a dramatic shift in people becoming more conservative in certain fronts, especially on the points of immigration and nationalism. The folks who dominate the kinds of sites that write about that stuff can’t abide by that. So they have strong incentives to denounce that all as the product of sheep-like voters being influenced by propaganda.

Tade0• 7 years ago

Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for.

We had (in Poland) at least one party which suddenly sprung into existence with decent poll results, was very pro big business and had pretty shady financing.

Fortunately they(especially their leader) were incompetent.

What I'm trying to say is that to me your account is not surprising at all.

nabla92• 7 years ago

In Finland we have similar attempt happening just now.

"Movement Now" is just starting. It was created by multimillionaire (net worth $300 Million) member of the parliament after he was denied promised position in the cabinet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_Now

KozmoNau73• 7 years ago

An important note about Liberal Alliance is that they are not a liberal party in the American sense.

They claim to somewhere between classical liberal and libertarian, but they are in fact by-the-book Ayn Rand objectivists. However that label has some negative connotations (for good reason), so officially they stick to the claims of classical liberalism, libertarianism and individual freedom above all.

It's a very interesting party, and as their recent collapse has shown, a party of very strong-willed individualists.

kodz4• 7 years ago

Money is not magic. Yes it opens doors when it comes to political power, but it also paints a big fucking sign on the head of the spender, that this dude is the one to milk. They do get milked much more than they actually influence anything, the whole while having their heads inflated about their importance.

orbifold• 7 years ago

The articles reasoning is flawed: It does not recognize that the rise of the new far right is in answer to neoliberalism and globalism. The problems they are describing are caused by this old neo liberal anti-nationalist but still right wing agenda. I guess it is confusing to them that the current Italian government both is cracking down on immigration and for the first time is introducing long term unemployment insurance. Unrestricted immigration was also the weapon of choice for the elite in the US in the 19th century. You could pit Germans against Irish against former Slaves and it is still one of the reasons that today there are so little social benefits, because people think “those people” will take advantage of it.

I guess it is not surprising because the Zeit has been the mouthpiece for a globalist neo-liberal elitist agenda in Germany for a long time. Their editor in chief is a warmongering (has argued for a preemptive attack on Iran for example) Havard educated neo liberal.

lotsofpulp2• 7 years ago

Everybody likes thinking they are in the class above the one they are in, which requires having a class below.

tannhaeuser3• 7 years ago

It's not surprising at all considering NSDAP (name of the orginal Nazi party) stands for "National-Socialist German Worker's Party" (emphasis mine).

genera12• 7 years ago

Do you really need an explanation, how Hitler had nothing to with socialism, or are you just spewing far right talking points without regard for fact or reason?

jordanbeiber2• 7 years ago

Here in Sweden the leader of the most furthest right wing party (Sweden Democratic Party) just recently stated that they are pushing the new ”social democratic” agenda.

This despite being self-proclaimed conservative, nationalist, and right wing during the election.

It’s a bit scary what happens when history is lost on a new generation.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

I suspect that there is a civil war going on between billionaires that filters down to a proxy war on the political stage.

A lot of capital has tied itself to economic efficiency, which has a strong tendency to dictate globalism, which also lent it political support from both classical liberals and modern liberals (note, I am not using the word 'liberal' in the broadest sense, commonly used in the USA), for whom the increase in on the ground freedom of labour and capital was mostly considered worth the cost of creating the ultra rich.

Now however, a block of the newly created ultra rich have the wealth of small nations and are asking themselves, 'What if everywhere was small nations, wouldn't it be nice if we could become sovereign and rule openly over a balkanised mass of city-states?'.

This appears at ground level in the spectacle of little old ladies who worship Thatcher, confusingly starting to parrot the talking points of late 1990's anti-capitalists. Boris Johnson saying 'fuck business' during the Brexit negotiations with the EU was no accident. And this transformation has been so fast that people paying close attention to political swings would be prone to whiplash.

Ultimately though, the real power is held by the already globalised Zaibatsus, as they have control of production, so I also suspect that the princelings-to-be may be sticking their neck out a bit far right now.

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

It seems that the far right can never ever take responsibility for their own bigotry and I am sick of seeing the illogic of "it was the immigrants made me racist and caused me to make things worse for everyone. Obey us or else!"

If their petty bigotted spite is such that they would rather see no benefits when they are in need than benefits to all including "the other" the problem is clearly them. It certainly isn't some fiscal calculus involving actual resource constraints and yields.

It doesn't require some secret imaginary elite - they are perfectly capable of causing backwards ruination on their own. Even if they stumble upon an obvious truth (cooperation with outgroup would benefit us) they blame the outgroup's existence for the lack of cooperation instead of their moronic bigotry.

The truth is the problem has always been them and their bigotry. Deprived of an other they will other themselves and deploy divide and conquer tactics - on themselves. Set the dark brown hair against the black or A blood type against the Bs.

baybal23• 7 years ago

I am not agreeing with this opinion.

Think of the same comment put the other way around. What do you think of people "selling their vote for a mere promise of free sausages?"

VMG• 7 years ago

Democracy will take care of the "Superrich" (that will probably include most people on HN)

mschuster91• 7 years ago

I seriously hope so, but I doubt it. The problem is that we have ever more militarized police and, thanks to digitalization, basically a real-life 1984 scenario. Our German Interior minister actually wants access to Alexa and friends for the secret services.

KozmoNau73• 7 years ago

If the issue of massive inequality isn't taken care of, we are headed for even more of a cyberpunk dystopia than we are already living right now.

m12k• 7 years ago

I just hope we do it sooner, using regulation and taxation, rather than later using pitchforks. But if the superrich keep successfully distracting the populace with bigotry and other sideshows, we might miss that exit.

Kaiyou2• 7 years ago

Pitchforks won't work. The superrich learned from history and own private armies. Also, they don't live in the same town as the people with the pitchforks. Possibly not even the same continent.

yepguy• 7 years ago

Pay no mind to the sinister undertones.

atq2119• 7 years ago

Historically, the idea that a freer market and capitalism go hand in hand with democracy does have some merit. The fact that business became a more important factor for the power calculus meant that it was possible to challenge the autocratic status quo, and democracy was an alternative that was naturally favoured by many businesspeople at first because it promised a more meritocratic system.

Nowadays, the super rich have more power in practice than many of the autocrats who were thrown out by democratic movements of the long forgotten past, so their hubris leads some of them to work towards establishing autocratic structures again, believing that those will always work in their favour (newsflash: they don't, but that's another topic). Since capitalism alone does not put a check on this development, it is no longer a good ally of democracy. Still a useful tool when applied with measure and combined with other tools, but not an ally.

your-nanny• 7 years ago

I think a pretty good argument can be made that fall of the Roman Republic was a consequence of Rome's increasing business interests abroad, and the increasing importance of military leaders executing interventions, eg in Greece, in support of those interests.

nabla92• 7 years ago

Money and political power transfer naturally to each other.

In authoritarian countries, the ruler is usually superrich billionaire. In the western world there are limits, but they work better to one direction than another.

Clever politician may be able to get millions, but rarely hundreds of millions and never billions. Billionaires however can turn their money into politics. Only direct middling for political campaign is limited. Superrich can create institutions, whole universities, think tanks, academic positions, grants and lobbying groups. Even political parties.

ddebernardy• 7 years ago

Vox has much more interesting and detailed takes on this issue. See for instance the current season of their Future Perfect podcast, and this episode in particular:

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/future-perfect-3/e/6138...

A few articles that go through the same information as summaries or interviews for those who don't want to listen to the whole thing:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federal...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/29/18629799/federa...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/1/18629859/judge-r...

fallingfrog5• 7 years ago

To the point about inequality, it’s pretty clear that you can’t have political equality coexisting with dramatic economic inequality, because the mass of people would just vote themselves all the money until the discrepancy was eliminated. The measure of economic power of a group and the measure of their political power is always closely related.

Edit: ok downvoters, name me one example of any society ever in which political and economic power for some class of people was out of balance. Rome? No, the patricians has all the economic and political power. The ussr? No, the high ranking party members had all the economic and political power. China? No. The United States? No. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

fallingfrog5• 7 years ago

So if the rule is that economic and political power tend towards equilibrium, then the corollary is that moments of disequilibrium are followed quickly by economic or political change. For example, the rising French business class in an environment where the aristocracy has all the power was followed by the French Revolution. And as the article points out, the emergence of a global economic elite is followed by that elite coopting all the governments of the world. On the other side, the rise of strong unions was quickly followed by a period where there was a lot of political empowerment by the masses.

So, if I might suggest a solution, the answer to a situation where corporate power is transnational is a transnational union movement; something like an international congress of unions or maybe like the IWW.

AnimalMuppet3• 7 years ago

You can get close to that if you have a limited government, so that the mass of people can't just vote themselves all the money. (Though, if it's enough of the masses, they can vote a change in the limits on government...)

fallingfrog5• 7 years ago

I don’t understand- are you saying that if you had a limited government, you could have a situation where the people with the power and the people with the money were different people? Because I feel like that’s not what you’d get. If Emma Goldman and others are correct though, you might get a situation where the both power and money were distributed fairly equally. But they’d still be in the same hands.

bjornsing• 7 years ago

Isn't it Lobbying that is a threat to democracy? That's (the) one industry I think we should regulate the shit out of...

crankylinuxuser• 7 years ago

Its more complicated than that.

Sure, a lobbyist pays $10k a plate to fund a politician.. But its not buying a vote. The lobbyist is buying face-time with the politician.

And given a rapport over many times, the politician learns to trust the lobbyist. Those other people (citizens) don't really know anything, the politician thinks. The lobbyist comes from inside industry, and 'really' knows what's happening and why.

Lobbyists are just a paying type of royal advisors. And even if they weren't paying cash for plates of food, they would use their backing interests' money and power to exert 'assistance' in other ways.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Anyone gets face time with a politician to discuss their special interest is a de-facto lobbyist.

Sure, "lobbying" can get scummy if you push the graft envelope but for the most part "lobbyists" are just people from special interest groups who have made a career out of arguing their case to the politicians.

fallingfrog5• 7 years ago

I also want to point out that with respect to the connection or divorce between capitalism and democracy, there is no conflict between capitalism and slavery, in fact slavery is the purest expression of the capitalist ideal, since slavery is basically elevating property rights above personal/human rights.

Edit: not saying capitalism is equivalent to slavery. I’m just saying that the conflict between capitalism and freedom can be boiled down to a conflict between human rights, and property rights.

sametmax3• 7 years ago

Any concentration of power is a danger to democracy.

We understood that already, and separated the legislature, an executive, and judiciary branches of power. They are not bad, they are necessary, but you don't want them to mix.

We are now learning that the power of money must be separated as well. Money is not bad, but it should not mix with the rest.

And right now, they happily do.

makotech2222• 7 years ago

Actually, Marx figured that out in the 1800's. If you have two classes of people, the more powerful class will take control of government and advance interests for themselves.

sametmax3• 7 years ago

Not the same. Marx assumes you should have no rich people. Separating powers does not imply that. It just implies rich people should be isolated the other powers.

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

First step in Germany would be lock politicans up that take money from special interest groups and rich people and/or have another "side-" job in industry at the same time. Also lock politicians up when they take a relevant industry job afterwards.

Reality is politicians take a lot of money but do not need to declare where they take it from and right after their politician career will get well paid job from the people they regulated a short time before.

roenxi• 7 years ago

There is a key premise in this article. That premise is there is some unadulterated Will of the People that democracy is meant to uncover, and the Capitalists are subverting it.

To me the flaws in that premise seem pretty straightfoward - there is no truth that democracy seeks to uncover. Democracy is a highly effective release valve so that if the situation becomes intolerable then the ruling class is changed out. If you want to change the world, you need to convince the ruling class that change is needed, or the people that something else needs to be tried.

The idea that some people have more decision making power than others isn't some subversive perversion of what is good in the world, it is normal. Democracy is fantastic compared to a monarchy - the competition is systems where a lunatic ruler can appoint a horse to government. That is a pretty simple example of why democracy should be preferred.

Capitalism and Democracy are bedfellows because they are both the best systems we know of for filling roles that need to be filled - how to allocate resources and who gets to be in charge respectively. The problem isn't that the wealthy are also powerful, the problem is that the people are as disorganised and fractured in opinion as the politicians who represent them.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

To me the flaws in that premise seem pretty straightfoward - there is no truth that democracy seeks to uncover.

Sure there is. In fact, you are about to illustrate it unwittingly:

Democracy is a highly effective release valve so that if the situation becomes intolerable then the ruling class is changed out.

The truth democracy seeks to uncover is “is the leadership intolerable”; the corruption of democracy into plutocracy frustrates discovering g that answer as he weighting of political power by wealth biases toward showing the actual ruling class as tolerable irrespective of whether that is the mass feeling, and makes democracy a led effective safety valve.

fetbaffe• 7 years ago

Agree on the premise that the superrich can be a threat to democracy, however this article argues a fallacy, the superrich has a lot of lobbying power because the political system has en-massed a lot of political power in a few entities, like the EU.

The superrich then only needs to lobby a few entities instead of every country in Europe, or every region for that matter. Just take the latest lobbying success against the citizens of EU, the content filter & the link tax, proposing those two on the national level would never have been possible, because of the ease of circumvention, but on a EU level it can actually be enforced.

If you want to keep transnational organizations like the EU, then you need to make it immune to lobbying, which first of can't be done and maybe not even wanted. Not all lobbying is immoral per se, because parliaments are not experts on every subject, it becomes immoral when it has an obvious quid pro quo situation.

What you is left with is to stop people of becoming superrich and/or stripping wealth from the already existing superrich. Good luck passing that in any legislative chamber we have today.

The Superrich Endanger Democracy

Related Stories