Sorry, I dashed that post off quickly so my meaning got jumbled. I didn't mean to imply that it was "bunk" that he couldn't be bought. I meant it was bunk in the sense that his wealth is an unalloyed good. As billionaires go, Bloomberg is among the most benevolent, certainly among the subset that has entered politics. He has spent lots of money doing a lot of good in the world. And overall, I'm a fan of his. But his wealth raises two big concerns for me:fantasycurse42 said:
First, I just think it's generally a bad idea for anyone to amass too much power as a result of their net worth. I felt the same way when Dan Gilbert went around buying up lots of properties in Detroit (where I have a lot of family). He did a lot of good, but how scary is it to know that the fate of one of our great cities rests on the whims of a billionaire? What if, after doing all that, Gilbert had asked the city for some special tax break, or suggested to the DA that he go easy on him in a corruption investigation? (For the record, I'm speaking purely hypothetically. I have no evidence that Gilbert did any of those things.)
Second, in Bloomberg's case, while he hasn't done anything truly horrible, there have been a couple of flashes that offered a hint of how dangerous that power could be. This thread has a full rundown, but speaking from personal experience, the one that sticks out in my mind was his campaign to overturn term limits. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of term limits in principle, but the voters of NYC had supported them in two consecutive referenda. Bloomberg spread a ton of money around and convinced the city council to overturn the will of the voters. Then, once he had been re-elected to his third term, he closed the barn door behind him and re-instituted limits (via referendum!)
Could he have gotten it passed without all that money? Maybe, although it's worth pointing out that, even at the height of his popularity, Rudy never managed to get that done. Did that one-time change of term-limit rules represent a fatal undermining of democracy? Hardly, but it raised the prospect that, if Bloomberg were a little less benevolent, or if an issue was really important to him, he could probably push it through to pursue his own selfish ends at the expense of the city's.
The point I was trying to make was that having politicians go hat in hand to wealthy people to fund their campaigns is dangerous. Handing too much power over to billionaires who got elected in their own right is also dangerous, but in a slightly different way. Neither solves the other, and neither will be solved unless we somehow figure out a way to remove big money from politics.
