The Fungible Threat to the Enlightenment Philosophy

About Freedom, Wealth Concentration, and the Separation of Power

I know many people in the libertarian right quadrant of the political compass: progress studies people, economists, techno-optimists, anarcho-capitalists, proper libertarians, etc.

They usually ignore why people may oppose rich people getting richer on principle.

This essay is an explanation for them, focusing on how wealth concentration is an especially pernicious form of concentration of power.

The Starting Point: Free and Equal

It is bad for a stranger to have power over us.

Foremost, it is morally bad. People should be free and equal. Someone having power over us makes us less free, and less equal.

It's also personally bad. It makes our life worse, by having others decide things for us, by being anxious about how others decide to use their power over us, by making our choices less meaningful knowing they can be overruled, etc.

Finally, it is often instrumentally bad. When someone has power over someone else, we lose collective resilience. Before, we had different individuals trying different things; either of them failing is a collective learning opportunity. But after, the one with power controls everything, which halves our collective opportunities.

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The mere fact that a stranger has power over us is bad. This is unrelated to their personality, it is not about them being bad people. This is not about them threatening us.

We do not want to be subjected to their whims. We don't want our future to depend on whether they had a nice day or not. To depend on whether they like us or not. To depend on whether they maintained their mental health or went crazy.

We do not want to be subordinate to their vision of what's good. People always disagree on what's good, and that's alright. But at least for ourselves, we want to be able to decide and enact what we think is good. Being deprived of this is bad.

We do not want to suffer their mistakes. Even assuming that the stranger is stable and coincidentally shares our vision of what's good, we don't want to be worse off just because they got something wrong. Our mistakes are our own to make, and are part of what it means to be a free person.

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Everyone should be their own. Equal in our independence, and free from the coercion of others.

Strangers having power over us is a negation of this principle.

Power Gap and Coercion

When someone has power over us, freely dealing with them becomes impossible. As a power gap grows between two parties, the less powerful one becomes less and less free.

When someone has power over us, they can compel us. Power is the ultimate form of bargaining power: it morphs compromises and trade relationships into compulsion and coercion. This is the logic behind big stick ideology and gunboat diplomacy.

Through all of our dealings, we thus must ensure they never try to compel us. When someone has power over us, we must ensure that they keep liking us, that they stay sane, that they do not make mistakes that would hurt us, that they stay aligned with our visions of good, etc.

This dynamic usually feels bad to both parties. Normal people dislike walking on eggshells. Normal people also dislike others walking on eggshells around them. This means that normal people often dislike having power over others too. Thus, it is very common for people to try to avoid this dynamic, often by denying it even happens.

This happens, all the time, everywhere.

This happens at work between an employee and their boss. This happens in age-gap relationships. This happens with policemen, civil servants, bankers, judges and all the other people who may get power over us at various points in our lives.

This obviously happens with our politicians and billionaires.

Terrorists try to get power through the threat of random violence. Without going as far terrorism, this is often a desired effect of bullying and doxxing. Curtailing someone’s freedom, gaining power over them, by being violent and more or less explicit about threats.

Bounds on Power

The Universe is cold and uncaring. Not everyone is equally powerful. There are naturally big power imbalances. It starts with physical power. In a state of nature, stronger people naturally have more power.

Over time, we’ve built cultures and institutions that transcend this basic state of affairs. “Might makes right” may well be true the state of nature, but civilisation is in great part about transcending this.

We approximately all understand that civilisation starts with preventing people from exerting their physical power whenever. The staunchest libertarians still subscribe to some version of the “Non-Aggression Principle” (NAP).

The Enlightenment Philosophy goes further than the NAP, a mere prohibition on violence. It acknowledges that there are many forms of power beyond direct and overt physical violence. Examples include the power to harm one’s reputation, to restrain someone economically, or to hurt someone’s feelings.

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Sadly, we are still very far from a world where everyone is free from the attempts of others at hurting them, coercing them, or making the world around them worse.

We live in a society. It is expected that at various times, people will have power over us. Still, we want to coexist without worrying about others randomly using their power over us. The Enlightenment Philosophy deals with this by bounding anyone’s power and punishing excessive use of power.

This goes well beyond the NAP. The Enlightenment Philosophy avoids not merely bad uses of power, it deals with excessive ones. This is the point of punishing corruption. Even when it does not hurt anyone, it reinforces a system where people could use their power to hurt people.

The Enlightenment Philosophy stresses that compulsion is a spectrum, that goes from physical control and explicit coercion, to power differentials and implicit threats.

It’s not only that people should not be physically violent to each other and their properties.

It is that we should be safe from anyone having even temporary power over us. Whether it is a politician, a judge, a policeman, a company boss, a teacher, a government employee, or whoever else.

To a great extent, this is what we historically meant by fairness and the Rule of Law.

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The typical libertarian answer is that this is all downstream of the NAP. Let’s assume our physical safety and property rights were always secured. Then we would not care about anyone having more bargaining power over us: we could always deal with someone else.

This is wrong in two ways.

The first one is that it is not a guarantee that someone wants to deal with us. Despite all talks of “comparative advantage”, if someone costs more than they can give, there is no economic incentive to deal with them. So old people, diseased people, disabled people, would all be left to fend for themselves at worst, or subordinate to others at best.

The second one is that power gaps are the very thing that makes the NAP unenforceable. The NAP is not magic, it’s enforced through institutions. And let’s say someone has enough power to hide their actions from the NAP enforcement institutions, by being rich enough to corrupt its agents for instance. Well then, the NAP doesn’t matter to them! They can just subvert it.

Power Concentration

We live in a society. It is expected that at various times, people will have power over us. But we want to minimise it, and avoid individuals having too much power at once. The Enlightenment Philosophy understands that power concentration is bad and dangerous in itself.

This is why political power was separated into judiciary, legislative and executive powers. This is a cornerstone of Enlightenment Humanism and modern civilisation. Even non-republican regimes now think in terms of the three branches of government, and as centralising all three of them! Total victory.

Similarly, this is why the fourth power (the Media) was watched closely. Western governments historically cared a lot about newspapers, radio and TV. They tried to strike a good balance between freedom of expression and managing the risks of propaganda, hysteria, mass disinformation, misuse, and so on. Although we gave up with social media and are paying the price, this was the historical norm.

And this is why enforcing a separation between economic and political power is so important. People with outsized economic power have many more opportunities to mess with the government, and it is bad to have to suffer this without any checks and balances. Without strict enforcement, we get clientelism, revolving doors, kleptocracy, and all-around political corruption.

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From the perspective of the Enlightenment Philosophy, Elon Musk is a great example of the type of power concentration we ought to avoid in a single person.

He became a billionaire, with outsized economic power.

Then he used that economic power to buy Twitter, acquire a massive amount of media power, and use it to steer the discourse where he wanted.

Finally, he leveraged all of that to get himself into a close alliance with Trump and get massive amount of political power through DOGE.

Capitalism and Separation of Powers

Capitalism empirically leads to wealth concentration. At the same time, historically, capitalism has preceded global improvements for everyone. And finally, it is also true that on a purely redistributive level, it makes a few people much richer.

This is not a law of nature, but a mere contingent empirical fact. There is not one simple cause of this, and many have come up with their explanations.

We could easily write about imaginary societies where capitalism does not lead to wealth concentration. We could also ensure this is not the case, by having tax brackets with extremely high level of taxation.

(To be clear, such taxation would be a terrible idea. There are deep reasons for why capitalism leads to wealth concentration. Punitive taxation doesn’t address them, makes things worse, and is quite bad when the individuals being punished have done nothing wrong in itself.)

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Wealth concentration leads to the concentration of all powers. Wealth is the economic form of power. It is special in that it is designed to be fungible: it is quite easy to acquire physical, social or political power through wealth. This is why wealth concentration leads to a few people having power over many others.

Regulatory capture, corruption and state capture provide a clear incentive gradient for holders of outside economic power to subvert states.

More generally, whatever constraint is put on a person or a company, economic power is a blanket solution to subvert it. This is what it means for money to be fungible. And this is why economic power is more special than media power or scientific authority.

Hence, a large part of separation of powers ought to be about separating specifically economic power from other forms of power. This doesn't have to be enforced through laws. It may be enforced through constitutional articles, the same way separation of power is traditionally instantiated. It may also be enforced culturally: by paying close attention to revolving doors and never electing influence peddlers.

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Preventing the concentration of powers is the main way to maintain democracy in the presence of capitalism. Without strong anti-corruption, capitalism leads to billionaires getting a lion's share of all forms of power, and particularly political power. This is colloquially called plutocracy.

Plutocracy may arise from both legal and illegal means. It can result from rich people buying newspapers, and entire social media platforms. It can result from revolving doors, super PACs, behind-the-scenes partnerships or leveraging influence during elections.

Conversely, preventing the concentration of powers is the main way to maintain capitalism in the presence of democracy.

Without strong anti-corruption, the straightforward way to maintain power in the hands of the people is to ban excess individual wealth beyond a threshold.

I personally think banning excess wealth is a bad idea, and that it should not be considered before we punish and deter actual corruption.

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Plutocracy is empirically not conducive to liberty and democracy. When a rich group has a lot of power over everyone else, they rarely conspire to ensure everyone stays free. Kleptocratic dictatorships sadly abound.

This is not about the personality of billionaires. Some are mean, some are nice. Some are evil, some are good. But that's beside the point. The point is that separation of power is a core principle of the Enlightenment Philosophy. Defeating kings was not about them being bad people, it was about splitting the levers of power so that no one may wield them them unilaterally.

Our collective well-being should depend on our people being free, equal and industrious. Not on whether we trust a few people having outsized power over everyone.

Conclusion

I wanted to write a direct criticism of libertarianism, but I needed to make the point about power first.

In the past, I would have just written a massive essay against libertarianism, with that point being a sub-sub-part or something. But I am now practising writing shorter, more self-contained essays.

This essay is not about solutions. So in itself, it is not a critique of libertarianism or our current systems, given that I am not presenting an alternative.

This essay is only about illustrating problems.

On this, cheers!