Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [144]
That’s one side of this divide. On the other is a very different group: again, insanely rich, but souls who are keen to give up their power. Not because they hate the attention of the president of the United States (though, I imagine, depending upon the president, there are those sorts, too). And not because their own business wouldn’t benefit from the sort of access and interest their position now gives them (for, of course, for many of these people, a good and effective relationship with the government is a key driver of their bottom line). But rather, because they recognize that in a democracy their power is wrong. Not their wealth. Their power. There’s nothing wrong with getting rich. There’s everything in the world to praise about being successful in business, or sports, or the arts. But the idea that in a democracy you should be able to trade your wealth into more influence over what the government does is just wrong. It denies the basic principle of “one person, one vote.” It says some votes are more equal than others, and solely because of the money those voters have.
That’s an important qualification. The egalitarianism that democracy demands is not that there be no influential people. It is that influence be tied to something relevant to the democracy. I was once told of the conversion story of one young, connected (as in to the most powerful people in our society) soul. She described a day on Capitol Hill when the group she led was trying to lobby to get a special provision added to the health care bill to benefit children. The idea was to get senators to talk to the nation’s leading expert on children and health. Though the group had planned the day for weeks, they couldn’t get any confirmed meeting with any representative or senator of any significance. Everyone promised they would meet if they could, but as the day of the meeting approached, the members were all too busy.
The morning of their seemingly doomed tour, this connected soul made a single telephone call to the chief fund-raiser for one of the senators. Within minutes, the calendar of that senator, and other members’, had been cleared, and the group got their meetings. Of course, no promise had been made. It was a simple request for a favor. But because of who she was—a powerful, intelligent, connected soul—the favor was immediately granted.
As the group left the Capitol after the meeting—literally, as they were walking down the steps behind the building—the connected woman who had made the call got a telephone call herself. It was from the chief fund-raiser for one of the senators they had just met. “Do you think you might help the senator out by holding a small event in LA?” As she reflected to me later on, this is a system where “the most important person on the issue of children’s health had practically no access at all, yet I, merely because of wealth and connections to wealth, have all the access I want. This,” she said to me, “is wrong.”
These rich people—people like this woman, or Arnold Hiatt or Alan Hassenfeld (chairman of Hasbro) or Jerry Kohlberg (co-founder of Kohlberg & Company) or Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (CEO of Warner Music Group) or Vin Ryan (founder of Schooner Capital)—recognize that there’s something wrong with their power. Each of them came to see this in different ways. But now they all see it. And some, such as Hiatt and Hassenfeld, have now made it their life’s work to dismantle their own power, and the power of people like them, so as to restore this republic.
There’s something astonishing and hopeful about these good rich souls. I’m never much moved by large charitable gifts from the very rich, for rarely do those gifts actually change the comfortable life that the giver leads. Much more impressive to me is the family of four, struggling to make ends meet, which manages nonetheless to commit to the United Way, or to put a significant amount in the church collection plate