Wealth Inequality Is Power Inequality
There's a video of Dave Chappelle at a town meeting in the small town in Ohio where Dave Chappelle lives. Dave Chappelle walks up to the mic to inform the mayor and town council of Dave Chappelle’s displeasure at the prospect that they will approve an affordable housing project in the town in which Dave Chappelle lives. What separates Dave Chappelle from any other disgruntled town dweller, is that he can threaten to remove Dave Chappelle’s $60 million investment in the city. Dave Chappelle begins by saying “Hello I’m Dave Chappelle,” in the tone of Dave Chappelle introducing himself knowing full well that he, the Dave Chappelle aforementioned, needs no introduction. Dave Chappelle continues: “I can’t believe you would make me audition for you like this.” His words drip, not with that healthy anger which citizens in a democratic society are entitled to have toward public servants; nor is he defiant, as a mere citizen might be before his government. He is contemptuous, not simply of the city government, but of, it seems to me, the very idea of civil government. As if to say: “How dare these mere elected officials, these paupers, these beggars, these indigents, whose wealth cannot begin to rival my own, defy me, he who holds the economic fate of this city in the palm of his hand.”
Imagine for a second somebody had said to you: “Suppose we give Dave Chappelle the power to determine housing policy for a random small town in Ohio.” You would probably respond: “Dave Chappelle? The comedian? What the hell is wrong with you?” Suppose I said “Let’s give Bill Gates significant power over global public health.“ You would probably respond “The Microsoft guy? The guy behind Windows? Please, whatever you’re using, cut back the dose”
I hope these hypothetical conversations strike you as absurd. They should. But as absurd as these imaginary exchanges are, in which comedians and computer programmers are given power over areas far beyond their expertise and skill sets; what is far more absurd, is that the power has been given without the conversations ever needing to have happened. Instead, we’ve somehow given Dave Chappelle the power to decide he has the power to dictate municipal housing policy. On a far grander and more impactful scale, we’ve given Bill Gates the power to decide he should have a major say in global public health. We’ve given the Koch brothers the power to create major institutions, like the Cato Institute, that have influenced American politics on a gargantuan scale, and to effectively assume authority over entire universities.
Adages like “Money is power” and “money talks'' are commonplaces in our society, yet when we talk about wealth inequality, we primarily think in terms of the ratio between the income of CEOs and the income of the average worker in a corporation, or about the fact that Jeff Bezos has enough wealth to end world hunger. These are important, but the latter normalizes the fact that one man has the power to end world hunger. This way of thinking also implicitly normalizes that the same man who could choose to end world hunger, but doesn’t, also owns one of the most august media organizations in the country: The Washington Post. To reiterate: Would any of us decide to entrust somebody with a pillar of the public square simply because they’d created a website that lets you order books online? What if that someone had turned said website into a delivery company, general purpose marketplace, bulwark of the information superhighway and tormentor of workers? I wouldn’t. But I didn’t get a say, except insofar as I’ve used Amazon. But rich people own pretty much all the media, so I think I can forgive myself that particular indiscretion. Maybe.
How, then, does extreme wealth inequality look when seen not as a matter of lifestyle variance, but as a matter of power? The transition from feudalism to capitalism famously ruptured the manorial union between political and economic power. But, one could also argue it was able to do this precisely because power is control of resources. Political and economic power could then be seen as identical. The king may nominally own my land and have the power to dispossess and kill me if he so chooses; but it is much more lucrative and productive for him to skim his portion from my industry (which is really the industry of the workers I employ, of course) and luxuriate. It’s enough to manage a realm without also having to manage its fields, mines, factories etc. One may dispossess individual owners of wealth, never the very class of wealth holders. In a society built on exploiting the majority of the population, they are an inescapable twin sovereign whether they wield private armies of their own or not. The essential difference between an owner of wealth and a mere manager of it is the “natural” ability to pass said wealth to one’s descendants. This inheritance of financial, human and social capital is the very stuff of social inertia and so whatever political skin one stretches over it, said skin, whatever pretense it may make to being the dominant partner, must rely on the class sovereignty of wealth. In a feudal situation, this reliance is unitary, the political masters of the state are its economic masters and vice versa, so there’s little question of influence. In the event that a commoner ever becomes wealthy enough to become a political player, one could be sure that through some form of ennoblement, the fundamental union between the political and economic would be closed.
Our contemporary society, because it is nominally based upon the consent of the governed, modifies this somewhat. The power of the wealthy comes through political influence and the power to perform quasi-governmental functions like funding research into malaria and creating think tanks (which we may think of as research universities without students.) The modern state functions as a stable organization through which personnel pass, rather than as a legitimating abstraction for personal authority, and so rather than fight the sovereign as “overmighty subjects” have done in the past, the rich simply use campaign finance and propaganda to constrain the state as much as possible to its classic function under classical liberalism: That of preserving private property. With private property secured, it’s simply a matter of preventing the nominally sovereign masses from pressuring the state to reduce the prerogatives of private property through regulation and taxation. This is, of course, quite familiar territory, but typically one which is traversed with an eye toward profit and greed. Looking at wealth inequality through the lens of power, however, reveals to what extent the prerogatives of private property, by which I mean the spheres of social activity open to the market, constitute a form of sovereignty, a reunion of the political and economic power, if one can even suppose they’d ever been separated.