Why they fear Trump, page-2058

Why America’s broligarchs support Donald Trump
Some Silicon Valley CEOs see any form of democratic constraint on themselves as illegitimate by definition.
Aug 7, 2024

Trump promises massive tax cuts and looser regulation. That’s good for the broligarchs’ pocketbooks. It’s also a stark contrast with the Biden administration’s stricter enforcement of antitrust laws, its crackdown on cryptocurrency scams, and its stunning turnaround of the IRS – which, after stepping up efforts to catch rich tax cheats, recently announced that it had recovered $1 billion in past-due taxes owed by “high-income, high-wealth individuals.”

While tech libertarians were happy for Biden to bail out their failing finances – last year, his administration saved Silicon Valley Bank, and several broligarchs, by lifting the limit on federal insurance for deposits – they are not so keen on government when it constrains their ability to grow richer.

One wealth adviser told me that some of his clients sincerely “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.

This mindset comes through in a 1997 book that Thiel has listed among his favourites of all time: The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. The text unironically likens the ultrarich to “the gods in Greek myth”, and assures readers that they deserve no less than world domination: “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies.”

Thiel said that it offered a “prophecy” of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today”. Thiel has famously argued that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

To many billionaires’ dismay, democratic governance involves taxation, regulation, and scrutiny by the free press. The same system that facilitated their prosperity through the rule of law and good economic stewardship also constrains them – as it does all of us. But hell hath no fury like a broligarch who doesn’t get his way.

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