Enemies of the State? How Billionaire Philanthropists Think About Government
Are wealthy philanthropists hostile toward government? It’s easy to think so if you read critiques of the billionaire donor class—most recently Anand Giridharadas’s book, Winners Take All. Today’s leading benefactors, we’re told, vastly prefer privatized solutions to social problems—especially ones that they themselves devise by tapping their business chops and channeling the free market’s magical powers.
This argument is most familiar in regard to public education, where philanthropists are said to be leading the charge to privatize America’s most cherished public institution—our schools.
In my own book, The Givers, I looked at how a cabal of wealthy donors and conservative foundations have bankrolled a 40-year assault on government—with the goal of cutting taxes, downsizing the regulatory state and eviscerating civil rights protections.
My book also examined how private donors are increasingly stepping into the void left by weak government. You can see this most vividly in higher education, where mega-givers are riding to the rescue of public universities battered by declining state investments in these systems. Wealthy philanthropists, who’ve benefited hugely from historically low tax rates since the early 1980s, now receive accolades for solving problems that their class helped create. The fall of government and the rise of big philanthropy, I wrote in The Givers, can seem like entwined subplots in a larger story about a plutocratic power grab.
In fact, though, the story is not so simple.
The crusade to shrink government down to the size “that it can be drowned in a bathtub”—to paraphrase Grover Norquist’s memorable phrase—has never been a shared project of the upper class, but of a powerful libertarian faction within that class. Even the ceaseless drive for tax cuts over a generation has mainly animated wealthy people on the right. Many less ideological rich people aren’t so worked up over taxes; after all, when you’re loaded, you can easily afford them. And while polls show that the wealthy are more fiscally conservative than the public writ large, it’s also true they tend to favor many government functions: a globalist foreign policy, infrastructure, education, scientific research, space exploration, environmental protection, and so on. They understand that these things cost money.
In Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas doesn’t much explore this larger context, but rather argues a tighter brief: that today’s wealthy elite has contempt for government and a reflexive affinity for privatized solutions. Like the many progressive critics of charter schools, Giridharadas depicts philanthropists as trying to shove government aside so they can call the shots, guided by market ideology and their own brilliance. Diane Ravitch has been most trenchant on this point, arguing that a clueless “billionaire boy’s club” of education reformers has done an end-run around democracy—only to make a mess of things in places like Newark, with kids of color paying the price.
These and similar criticisms offer a devastating picture of an overclass that’s become a powerful adversary of government by and for the people. But this is neither a full nor accurate accounting of how wealthy philanthropists think about the public sector. In fact, it’s misleading in key respects.
If you put aside the libertarian ideologues like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family, what you’ll find is that most of today’s wealthy philanthropists think about government in much the same way that big donors Continue reading: Enemies of the State? How Billionaire Philanthropists Think About Government — Inside Philanthropy
Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Public Schools - NPE Action - http://npeaction.org/?p=7962 via @NPEaction
