#global warming is hella real too dude

[fullregalia]

every billionaire is a policy failure.

A few years ago, during the GOP primaries, I re-watched the pilot of The Apprentice because 2015 was a more naïve era. I had forgotten the garishly goofy title sequence that played “For the Love of Money.” It was a perfectly ironic encapsulation of the Trump ethos: while it was meant to make him seem enviable, it warns of the corrupting power of money, of the relentless drive for it.

Since I began working in the arts a decade ago, I have been exposed to various echelons of wealthy people I would never encounter in my day-to-day life. I’ve processed their five- and six-figure checks, I’ve written thank you notes to their family foundations. I never really questioned it; I just sort of knew this is the kind of thing socialites do. I am just a person who inputs data, says hello to them at check-in, and sometimes I get free hors d'oeuvres at events. I always make jokes about how much I love free snacks, but it comes from a genuine place of (in)security: duh everyone loves free food, but also when I was younger an hors d'oeuvre was a big deal--at 22, it meant I wouldn’t have to spend money I didn’t have on dinner; for a billionaire, it was like the 15th passed app they had that week. As I began to have more of a career, every 3% raise made a small impact, but I kept processing checks for things like a table at a Gala that could easily pay my rent for months.

I think the glamorous programming in the arts is window dressing for the wealthy patrons who cut checks that sustain our annual operating budgets. People like to pat themselves on the back for being charitable. Who can blame them? They are fighting diseases, supporting the arts, seemingly setting higher standards for their peers, yet, at the same time, they’re perpetuating capitalist structures that foster inequality. I used to be less skeptical of philanthropy, but in recent years, my disillusionment with both the non-profit sector and the financial sector have led me to question the root structures of why we need it in the first place. It’s the motivating idea behind my graduate studies in public policy: what is the right balance between private and public funding of our cities? Can we have a robust society sustained by the discretionary charitable inclinations of a small cadre of the uber wealthy?

I don’t have the answer to this, but the question of billionaires in general has been in the news a lot thanks to AOC, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, and the outsize influence money has in politics (looking at you, Schultz and Anthony Kennedy). As I’ve posted here before, I was interested in Anand Giriharadas’ book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. I’m currently on the last chapter of it and while I’m probably more familiar with the world of philanthropy than his average reader, I’ve found it a good alarm to society at large: this kind of efficient-markets solution to social problems is unsustainable, borderline reckless, and mostly self-serving. 

So, it’s easy for me, a certified non-billionaire, to agree that on some fundamental level billionaires are a failure of policy. I think the answer is obviously more complex and more complicated. Similarly to entitlement programs like Social Security or government-subsidized healthcare, it’s hard to take away something once it has entrenched itself in the system, and it’s even harder to do so when the people you want to take it away from have almost unlimited means to get their way (RIP, Gawker). We must think of ways to bolster and safeguard our democracy, but how do you solve a problem like money when you need to generate money to fix the issue?

Anyway, it’s something we’ll be talking about as the primaries continue, and I’ll probably be thinking about it for the rest of my career. I once was on a date with a guy who said, “don’t worry about global warming, when it gets bad enough people like Elon Musk will fix it.” He literally said that! Maybe I guess at the end of the day a brave billionaire like Elon Musk will fix all our problems, but in the meantime, we have to work towards successful solutions to policy failures one cocktail party at a time.