When One Purse Drowns a Chorus of Citizens

The figures before us are, even to one long accustomed to reckon millions, astonishing. In a contest for a Senate seat in Texas, more than $158 million in outside spending now supports one candidate. We are told that the largest share of this torrent comes from one of the world’s richest men, who in a single month sent $158 million to a political fund, which immediately passed it on to a group backing that candidate. The rival, perceiving the disproportion, has likened himself to David set against Goliath. When the sling-stone of argument must contend with the siege engines of treasure, we may doubt whether the field remains a fair one.

Consider how unequal the parties to this bargain must feel. The ordinary voter attends a rally, perhaps contributes a modest sum spared from rent or from groceries, and gives what is dear to him: his single voice, his single vote. Opposite him stands a man who, in the same season, dispatches $158 million to a superstructure of political committees, and a further $75 million and $83 million at other moments, much as another might order stationery. The first sacrifices consumption; the second reallocates a trifle of his capital. To call these two contributions equal in a moral or political sense is to make a jest of equality.

In commercial society, as I argued in the Wealth of Nations, it is the admirable property of markets that, where competition prevails, a rich buyer and a poor buyer offer the same price for the same loaf; wealth enlarges the basket, not the voice in the higgling and bargaining. In this species of political market, the rule is inverted: the rich buy not more bread, but more speaking. Money there does not merely purchase posters or messengers; it buys the power to frame what questions shall be asked, what fears shall be stoked, what characters shall be exhibited in lights favourable or detestable. The price system of politics thus ceases to record the strength of public preference, and begins instead to register the depth of private purses.

When I observed that people of the same trade seldom meet without contriving a conspiracy against the public, I had in mind merchants seeking to raise prices; yet the principle travels easily. Here we see not a guild, but a narrower and more potent confederacy: the alliance of vast fortune with organised party machinery. The party receives what every interest loves—a concentrated benefit in the form of advertising, organisation, and advantage over its rival. The payer purchases something less visible but more precious: a greater probability that officers of state will look with a favourable eye upon his concerns, or at least with a cautious one upon his adversaries. The cost is borne, not by them, but by a dispersed multitude whose influence is silently discounted.

Self-love is not, in itself, a vice; it is the great movable principle which, under just rules, conducts each of us to attend to our own affairs, and by so doing contributes to the prosperity of the whole. But every system that pretends to rest upon self-interest must take care what interests it creates. When political victory can be so mightily assisted by the favour of a single benefactor, candidates will naturally cultivate that favour; their imagination will dwell less upon the quiet citizen whose vote is solitary, and more upon the patron whose signature moves eight or nine figures at a stroke. The rules of the game have been so contrived that to serve the many requires, first, to propitiate the one. We should not be surprised if virtue often comes second.

The impartial spectator—the well-informed but disinterested observer of whom I spoke in The Theory of Moral Sentiments—would, I think, feel an uneasiness here that no talk of “freedom” could entirely soothe. He would see a bartender at a rally, telling a reporter she makes decent money yet cannot hope to buy a house, and would compare her situation with that of the magnate whose political wishes travel on a river of gold. He would observe that the same offices of justice and legislation are to govern them both, yet that one approaches those offices with petitions backed by millions, and the other with empty hands. The forms of equal citizenship remain; the substance feels alarmingly hollow.

What then is the proper business of the state? Not to silence rich men as such, for to proscribe a class merely because it is prosperous would be both unjust and imprudent; nor yet to pretend that such disproportions are of no public consequence. The duties of government, as I once sketched them, are defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works which private persons cannot profitably maintain. To these, modern prudence must add a fourth: to guard the republic from the vile maxim of the masters of mankind—“all for ourselves, and nothing for other people”—when it seeks not only to command markets, but to purchase, wholesale, the very conditions of political competition. A people that leases out its voice will soon find it has nothing left to sell but its obedience.