Ways and Means

by Daniel Lefferts

and decision-making power in the hands of an unelected few, a self-appointed peerage of benevolent billionaires. People put faith in these billionaires to grow the economy, advance innovation, preserve institutions, cure all manner of sicknesses and social maladies, believing their success to be a measure of their genius, of their efficiency, of their superiority to the lumbering, blundering government. But this faith was born of self-spiting optimism. It ignored the fact that these billionaires had accrued their wealth and power at the expense of the government and of the people themselves, that their genius and efficiency lay in shirking taxes, suppressing wages, militating against antitrust reform, busting unions. It ignored the fact that the problems they’d been entrusted to solve were often ones they themselves had created, and that very possibly they’d created them so as to solve them and thereby reorder society however they pleased. Not least it ignored the fact that these billionaires were, for all their benevolence, ultimately unanswerable to the people, mysterious in their intentions, inscrutable—that, really, no one knew them at all. Alistair was aware, as he sat slumped on the couch, that he might not have felt so dubious about this faith in billionaires if it weren’t for the billionaire that everyone did know, the real estate tycoon who’d pledged to return the country to its former glory, who convinced more and more people every day that he alone could do it, ...