That deal-making elitism led to the financial crisis of 2008. Its adoption by Obama cost the Democrats the House, the Senate, the presidency, and 1,000 state seats. If you want to go back to that, Mike's your guy. After all, backroom decision-making about the fates of others is what his cohort does.
Forbes notes that Bloomberg "pledged $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University, his undergraduate alma mater, adding to $1.5 billion he had already given the school."
That's generous, I suppose. But we need to remember that Bloomberg isn't just spending his own money. Assuming he takes the usual tax advantages that come with such gifts, he could also be spending a billion dollars or more of the people's money. Democracy lovers should ask themselves: Why should these decisions be made by an individual, and not by society as a whole?
Bloomberg's wealth is the product of a long chain of policy decisions, in areas that include taxation, monopoly power, and the use of publicly-funded technologies and networks by private enterprise. His extreme wealth reflects policy failures all down the line. It is we, not he, who pay the price: in loss of democracy, in loss of economic rights, and in a future that may well be for sale to the likes of Michael Bloomberg.
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