And what is actually quite shocking about this development in the United States is that America’s greatest political philosopher in the last 100 years, he's a man I actually met in Harvard, his name is John Rawls, I wrote my master's thesis, explaining the concepts of freedom and equality in the writing of John Rawls. And John Rawls said this, in a very prescient fashion 50 years ago, he said that “the liberties protected by the principle of participation, lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate”. So, if money can control public debate, then money will take over the decision making.
And unfortunately, the one decision that the supreme court made, that was disastrous, was the decision that is known as Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission in 2010. That decision basically said, this is a rough summary, that money has the right to free speech. So, just as human beings have the right to free speech, money has the right to free speech, and the result of that is that that was the critical step towards creating a plutocracy instead of a democracy. Martin Wolf from the “Financial Times” said, “the Supreme Court’s perverse 2010 Citizens United decision held that companies are persons and money is speech. This has proved a big step on the journey of the US towards becoming a plutocracy”.
If you have any doubts that money has taken charge of the political system, there are very serious academic studies that document how money has taken charge. In particular, I cite two Princeton University professors, Martin Guilens and Benjamin Page, they have very careful measurements about whose preferences are reflected in the decisions made by the US congress and US public institutions. And their conclusions, which they said, “the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact on policy change, than the preferences of average citizens do”. And the conclusion, therefore, is this, “in the United States, our findings indicate the majority does not rule”. Maybe I should repeat that. “In the United States, our findings indicate the majority does not rule, at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes”. They say that while you have all the processes of democracy, like regular elections, freedom of speech and association, all that makes no difference. At the end of the day, the decision do not reflect the wishes of the majority, and therefore, that is a plutocracy and not a democracy.