All the historical trajectories we have looked at in this book show how inti
mately the structure of in equality is related to the nature of the po liti cal regime.
Whether we were looking at premodern trifunctional socie ties or nineteenth
century proprietarian socie ties or slave socie ties or colonial socie ties, it was the way po liti cal power was or ga nized that allowed a certain type of in equality 117. On this point, see Chap. 11, and Piketty, Capital in the Twenty- First Century,
Chap. 12, Table 12.2.
118. To get an idea of the prob lem, recall that the thirty most elitist US universities admit more students from the wealthiest 1 percent than from the poorest 60 percent of the income distribution. See Chap. 15.
119. In the case of foundations serving the interests of families or private individ
uals, it is obvious that they should be taxed as private property. The boundary line is not always easy to draw, however, and that is why we need precise rules concerning the governance of foundations (which should not be controlled solely by their gen
erous donor) to determine what foundations deserve special tax treatment.
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Western society achieved a kind of unsurpassable perfection in the parliamen
tary democracy of the mid twentieth century. In fact, one can certainly improve on the parliamentary demo cratic model, which is increasingly contested.
Among the most obvious limitations of the parliamentary model today is its inability to stem the tide of rising in equality. In this book I have tried to show how today’s difficulties need to be seen in the context of a long and com
plex po liti cal and ideological history— the history of in equality regimes. Our pre sent prob lems cannot be solved without major changes to existing po liti cal rules. For example, I noted earlier that to establish social and temporary owner
ship through corporate power sharing and progressive taxation of wealth, constitutional and legal changes may be needed. This was also true in the past when similar questions arose: for example, the German Constitution of 1949 had to be written in such a way as to allow co management and social owner
ship of corporations, and the US Constitution had to be amended in 1913 to authorize federal income and inheritance taxes, which were subsequently made progressive. Other changes of po liti cal rules played equally impor tant roles in reducing in equality in other countries. In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords had to be stripped of its veto in the constitutional crisis of 1910–1911 in order for progressive taxation to see the light of day. In France, the social and fiscal reforms of 1945 and 1981 would have been much harder to achieve if the Senate had retained the veto power it enjoyed under the Third Republic— a power that the Socialists and Communists fought hard to eliminate in 1945–
1946. It would be a mistake to think that things will be diff er ent in the future:
transformation of the structure of in equality will continue to go hand in hand with transformation of the po liti cal regime. To shrink from changing the rules because it is too complicated is to ignore the lessons of history and forgo any possibility of real change. In Chapter 16 I discussed the EU’s una nim i ty rule on fiscal matters and the need to rebuild Eu rope on a social federalist founda
tion. I will say more in a moment about the need to change the rules and trea
ties that govern social and economic relations between states.
Another aspect of the po liti cal regime is also in need of urgent attention:
the financing of po liti cal campaigns and of po liti cal life more generally. In theory, universal suffrage is based on a simple princi ple: one woman (or man), one vote. In practice, financial and economic interests can exert an outsized influence on the po liti cal pro cess, either directly by financing parties and cam
paigns or indirectly through the media, think tanks, or universities. Earlier, I discussed the case of nonprofit media organ izations, which could become the
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standard for producing news, affording newspaper and other media companies much greater in de pen dence from their financiers (including major share
holders, owing to the ceiling on voting rights within the com pany).120 Direct financing of po liti cal campaigns and parties can obviously influence the pri
orities of po liti cal parties and complicate the adoption of mea sures to combat in equality, owing for instance to the radical hostility of many wealthy donors to more steeply progressive taxes.
The question of po liti cal financing has never really been considered in a comprehensive way. To be sure, many countries have passed laws limiting the influence of private money in politics. Some countries have engaged in timid efforts of public financing, such as Germany in the 1950s, the United States and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, and France in the 1990s. But it is striking to see how fragmented and incomplete those efforts have been and how little they have built on one another. In other areas of lawmaking, governments are quick to copy one another (as in the case of progressive taxation, for better and for worse), but when it comes to regulating the influence of money in politics, each country seems to act almost completely in de pen dently of the others. Recent work by Julia Cagé has shown, however, that meticulous examination of this complicated history can be highly instructive. In par tic u lar, analy sis of the vari ous mea sures that have been tried so far suggests that “demo cratic equality vouchers” offer an especially promising ave nue for exploration.121
In a nutshell, the idea would be to provide every citizen with an annual voucher worth, say, 5 euros, which could be assigned to the po liti cal party or movement of his or her choosing. The choice would be made online, for in
stance, when validating one’s income or wealth declaration. Only movements supported by some minimal percentage of the population (which might be set at, say, 1 percent) would be eligible. If an individual chooses not to support any party (or if support for the chosen party falls below the threshold), the value of his or her voucher would be allocated in proportion to the choices made by 120. See Cagé, Saving the Media. In addition to supporting new participatory
citizen controlled media, the public should take control of (or at least strongly regulate) digital platforms in quasi monopolistic situations and should impose very strict rules to combat sponsored content and unlimited extension of adver
tising (which today pollutes even the facades of historic monuments). Egalitarian demo cratic deliberation should be promoted.
121. See Cagé, The Price of Democracy. Full disclosure: Julia Cagé is my partner, which does not prevent her from writing excellent books, nor does it prevent me from reading those books in a critical spirit.
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—+1 other citizens.122 This last point is impor tant because the absence of a rule of
this type led to the collapse of the public financing experiment in the United States, where many citizens chose not to participate in public financing of po
liti cal parties of any kind. But democracy is not an option: if some people do not wish to participate, that should not reduce the level of public financing (which in any case is not enormous). Apart from the demo cratic equality vouchers, po liti cal contributions by firms and other “moral persons” would be totally prohibited (as is already the case in many Eu ro pean countries, such as France since 1995), and there would be a strict ceiling on private individual do
nations (which Julia Cagé proposes to limit to 200 euros per year). This new po liti cal financing regime would include very strict requirements for parties and movements that want to sponsor candidates; they would be required not only to publish their accounts but also to be totally transparent about their in
ternal statutes and rules of governance, which at pre sent are often extremely opaque.