The Moral Crisis Behind the Billionaire Wealth Tax

Beyond Mike Solana’s theory of power and the limits of "instrumental" culture.

In a recent article for Pirate Wires, Mike Solana argues that contemporary proposals to impose wealth taxes on billionaires — such as those debated in California and advanced at the national level by Senator Bernie Sanders — are best understood not as serious fiscal solutions, but as instruments in a broader struggle over political and cultural power and not in purely materialistic terms. Solana contends that the revenue such policies could plausibly generate would be negligible relative to the scale of government spending, suggesting that their true function lies elsewhere.

In his view, the structure of these proposals, particularly provisions that would treat founders’ voting control in private companies as taxable wealth, reveals an intention to weaken the authority of startup founders and entrepreneurs by forcing them to dilute or surrender control of their companies. Ultimately, Solana concludes that entrepreneurs and wealthy individuals should recognize this dynamic and respond accordingly: by investing more aggressively in media, education, technology, and local political institutions in order to preserve and extend their own capacity to shape the public sphere.

I am sympathetic to Solana’s argument in a few different ways: firstly, on the substance of it, I think that the proposed wealth taxes are bad. Secondly, I also agree that this is not mostly about money itself, but reflects other, more “spiritual” discontents of the public. And lastly, as I have written before, I believe that the old guard of intellectual elites, which largely overlap with the group of elites Solana takes issue with, has failed.

Yet I think Solana is mistaken in an important way. His proposed solution — that tech entrepreneurs should respond by funding more media outlets, educational institutions, and cultural platforms — carries a distinctly utilitarian tone. Of course, outlets and institutions matter. But culture cannot be built purely as a strategic response to political opposition. When institutions are created primarily as instruments in a struggle for influence, they often acquire a faintly artificial quality. They feel “engineered.”

This is the danger of what might be called a kind of cultural kitsch. According to French philosopher Oliver Roy, who has beautifully and cogently identified a crisis of culture in his book “Empire of Norms”, kitsch arises when symbols, traditions, and cultural forms are reproduced without the underlying spirit that once animated them. They mimic the appearance of culture but lack its organic depth. A media company founded merely to “counter the left,” or a university established to win ideological battles, risks becoming precisely this sort of hollow imitation. Cultural kitsch might feel like achieving your goals, but it is not long-lasting.

To travel down the path of cultural kitsch is ultimately self-defeating. In recent years I have come to think increasingly in the language of virtue ethics: that certain things must be done because they are right, and that in the long run what is right tends also to be what is also “useful”. Institutions, like individuals, cannot long survive when they betray the virtues that justify their existence. Intellectual life, in particular, rests on a fragile moral foundation — honesty, seriousness, and a devotion to truth that must remain independent of immediate political or strategic goals.

I remember quite clearly my own years in academia during the COVID pandemic. At the time, I warned colleagues—and wrote publicly—that the politicization of science would inevitably erode the authority of the very institutions they believed they were defending. By subordinating scientific judgment to momentary political needs, they were abandoning a duty owed not merely to their profession but to the public itself.

I was told, more than once, that such compromises were necessary — that certain facts needed to be managed or withheld for the sake of the greater good. Yet events that unfolded later confirmed what should have been obvious from the beginning: once an institution sacrifices the virtue that grounds its legitimacy, the loss of trust that follows is difficult, perhaps impossible, to repair.

The same principle applies to the cultural and intellectual institutions that some now propose to build as a counterweight to existing power. If they are created primarily for narrow, strategic purposes — as instruments designed to achieve predetermined political ends — they will inevitably acquire the hollow quality of artifice.

There is also, I think, a deeper misunderstanding in Solana’s diagnosis of the present moment. The growing hostility toward billionaires cannot be explained solely as a power struggle between political factions, nor can it be dismissed as the product of manipulative “leftist institutions” shaping public opinion. If one wants to seriously engage with this phenomenon, it must first be taken seriously on its own terms.

The California wealth tax, after all, enjoys the support of a majority of voters. Rather than reaching for easy and self-serving explanations about ideological brainwashing, it is more intellectually honest to ask why such policies resonate with so many people in the first place. Understanding that appeal requires looking beyond partisan narratives and examining the deeper moral and social frustrations that animate contemporary politics.

Much of the resentment directed at modern elites, including tech billionaires, has a moral undertone. Many people sense that those who hold great wealth and influence no longer occupy any recognizable civic or ethical role within the broader community. In earlier times, power was expected to carry visible obligations — duties of stewardship, patronage, and public virtue. Today those expectations are far less clearly articulated. As a result, dissatisfaction with the conduct of the powerful often finds expression in the only widely available moral language that remains legitimate in modern public life: equality. I see this as a structural change in modernity, not as some individual’s fault. Elites—whether intellectual, political, or financial—do not consistently embody virtue because societal expectations of their moral character have diminished. This development stems from broader shifts in our public philosophy, which I will examine further.

When I speak of equality here, I do not mean equality in the classical sense of a universal human right. What I have in mind instead is the contemporary impulse toward the equalization of outcomes, the growing discomfort with hierarchy, and the proliferation of oppression narratives that increasingly function as a central moral grammar in Western societies. The redistributive proposals now gaining prominence should be understood as part of this broader moral category of equality.

In a previous essay, I argued that the modern fixation with equality acts as a “consolation prize” in a secular era. As Western societies moved from a religious, “enchanted” worldview to a secular, “disenchanted” one, they lost the cosmic narratives that once gave every person—especially the weak or unsuccessful—a meaningful place in a divinely ordered hierarchy. In the modern world, individuals are understood as autonomous agents responsible for their own outcomes, which places a heavy burden on those who fail or fall behind. The language of oppression and equality, I argue, functions as a moral substitute for the lost religious framework: it preserves the idea that every life has dignity by attributing suffering to unjust systems rather than individual failure.

I want to expand this point by arguing that equality in a disenchanted world serves not only to reassure the “weak,” but also to constrain those who hold power. It offers a moral vocabulary through which we can judge when the powerful are acting improperly. In modern societies, power is often defined in terms of utility: those who generate wealth or exercise influence are regarded as successful or deserving. Yet without a shared conception of the good life, it becomes difficult to explain why such individuals might still be failing in their obligations to the community. In earlier eras, even the most powerful figures were understood to stand under a higher moral order. Kings, for instance, were accountable to God, and authority carried expectations of virtue, restraint, and stewardship.

Modern liberal societies are less comfortable articulating such expectations. Over the past century, political thought, influenced no doubt by the rise of secularism, has increasingly embraced the idea that the state should remain neutral regarding competing visions of the good life. As the philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, freedom came to be defined largely as the ability of individuals to pursue their own preferences without interference. The result is a society that carefully protects rights but grows hesitant to articulate shared ends.

One possible response is a return to a civic form of republicanism — the tradition that animated many of the Founding Fathers — in which the value of citizens is not measured solely by their economic utility but by their participation in a shared common good. Such a vision would require a society willing to articulate what that good consists of, and to speak openly about the virtues and forms of life that sustain it. Whether modern liberal societies still possess the confidence to define such shared ends — and whether disenchantment itself might be, even in part, reversible — remains an open question.

One possible response to this predicament is to look again to the example of the American Founding Fathers as models. They did not approach culture in a narrowly utilitarian way, nor did they see intellectual life merely as a tool for achieving political advantage. Many of them were highly educated and widely read, drawing deeply from classical history, Enlightenment philosophy, law, and theology. Figures such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton immersed themselves in ancient authors like Cicero and Thucydides, as well as Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Montesquieu. Their writings — most famously in The Federalist Papers — reflect a sustained engagement with the history of republics and the philosophical foundations of political order.

Just as importantly, the Founders understood that a republic could not survive on institutional design alone. John Adams wrote that “public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” insisting that a healthy political order depended on a genuine devotion to the common good. Benjamin Franklin expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom; as nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” For the Founders, culture, education (which was supposed to instill moral virtues, too), and intellectual life were not instruments to be deployed in the pursuit of power, but essential foundations of a free society.