Law & Liberty senior writer John O. McGinnis joins the podcast this week to discuss his new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich. Although they may be the focus of populist ire from the left and right alike, McGinnis contends that wealthy Americans play a vital role in counterbalancing majoritarian excess and serving as entrepreneurial “social prospectors” who can revitalize civil society.

Related Links

Why Democracy Needs the Rich by John O. McGinnis
“Blessed Are the Rich,” book review by James E. Hartley, Law & Liberty
“Liquidate the Rich?” by John O. McGinnis
“Mother’s Milk of the Revolution” by John O. McGinnis

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, senior editor to Law & Liberty. With me today is John O. McGinnis. He is the George C. Dix professor in Constitutional Law at the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University, also a contributing editor to Law & Liberty. And we will be discussing his book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich, recently published at Encounter Books. Professor McGinnis, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

John O. McGinnis (01:10):

Delighted to be here with you again.

James Patterson (01:14):

This is quite a provocative title and the title is also the book’s thesis. So tell me, why does democracy need the rich?

John O. McGinnis (01:22):

The argument is that the rich play a very important sort of Madisonian counterbalance role. That’s the first important role they play in democracy. So the complaint, you have to understand the premise of attacks on the rich in democracy have been that they have more influence than the average citizen. And I can see that, but note that there are a lot of groups that have more influence than the average citizen, the media, entertainers, academics, bureaucrats. They all are very important in shaping our public policy much more than the average citizen. And this was recognized from very early on. In fact, the name was given by Samuel Coleridge to this group called “the clerisy.” And their views all move in essentially one direction today. For reasons we can explain to the left, the rich have a much wider range of views. And so they actually act as a kind of counterbalance in a representative democracy.

(02:27):

It’s hopeless in a representative democracy to think that everyone’s going to have equal influence because many people aren’t interested and representatives have the opportunity to choose whose views they’re going to take seriously between elections. So we’re going to have differential influence, and what’s important is to have a plurality of views, and the rich really contribute to that. So that’s one of their important roles in democracy. There are others, but maybe we should begin with that one.

James Patterson (02:57):

Yeah. So you do talk about the clerisy at the beginning of the book, and they’re really like a combination, as you say, of bureaucrats, journalists, and academics. They have a major advantage in an American democracy that the rich don’t have. So why don’t you tell me about what you just assessed that advantage to be and how the rich counteract?

John O. McGinnis (03:17):

Well, their advantage is it’s their job to influence public opinion. That’s what they do. And that’s not what the rich do. What the rich have that the average citizen does not, they have both the resources and the independence to have some influence. So the independence is that many of them, most of them really aren’t very dependent on anyone else for their next dollar, except maybe consumers who aren’t that interested in their views, so long as they’re getting something for their money. And they also then have the resources and networks to shape views. And we see that in a variety of ways, both in their spending at election time, but also they’re setting up counter-infrastructures at universities through groups like the Federalist Society that inject a greater plurality of opinion because anyone like me who’s within a university recognizes how very strikingly homogeneous are the views.

(04:24):

And they’re all to the left. And in the law school world, which is what I know best, that actually leads to a lot of distortion. I mean, we want to have all views represented to get the best public policy. And organizations like the Federalist Society funded almost entirely by wealthy foundations and wealthy individuals are essential to ensuring the plurality of opinions that’s necessary for a democratically functioning society. So the rich turn out not to distort democracy as so much to correct distortions because it’s always been understood. The clerisy was thought to be a group that was necessary to lead democracy, but it’s always been understood by well-informed observers of democracy, that there are going to be some people who are going to have more power to shape it because the average citizen isn’t going to participate at least and think deeply about the issues before society.

(05:26):

They may vote and that will have an influence as well, but they’re not going to come up with the infrastructure of policy. And that’s one of the things that the rich help do by funding alternative centers of power.

James Patterson (05:40):

So not only do the chattering classes have a disproportionate influence on American democracy, so do interest groups. And the reason is that these organizations are especially mobilized to secure advantages from the government, such as subsidies or regulatory carve-outs. Are these not bastions of the rich? And if not, how do the rich differ from them in trying to pursue these efforts?

John O. McGinnis (06:05):

Well, the rich do. So I’m clear in the book that there are corporate interests that are special interests. So let me begin with the proposition that you began with, which I think is one of the most accepted propositions of political scientists that concentrated interest groups like unions, corporations, have differential power in the political process because they’re very focused on a few issues. They can raise money to get representatives interested in these issues and bring information to the fore. And the diffuse people, consumers, taxpayers, they have a collective action problem in combating these issues because often the special interests are against the interest of the diffuse interests. They like subsidies, they like regulations that will harm taxpayers and consumers. So the rich are able to counteract that again by their independence. They are not dependent on these interest groups. Moreover, they have the resources and then they have a kind of ideological interest.

(07:14):

They have perspectives on the world that are against some of the perspectives that the interest groups come up with. And we see that today. You might say the most important issue always for democracy is educating the next generation. And there, there are interest groups, the bureaucracies within K-12 education, the teachers, unions. I’m not saying that they don’t have some public spiritedness, but they obviously are shaped by their own interests. And that what the rich do is they offer a broad range of opportunities and perspectives, and they put their money behind it. So they’ve been behind charter schools, school vouchers. But interestingly, they’ve also, some of the more liberal-leaning rich people have tried to improve public schools from within. So they’re given a menu of options that we don’t see coming out of the interest group world, and that’s the way democracy can improve.

(08:14):

One point I make is that democracy improves by trial and error. Special interest groups are not actually so interested in trial and error because, of course, sometimes the trials are going to lead to results that aren’t congruent with their interest. They can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen, but the rich are able to do that. And one other thing they do, I think that comes from their entrepreneurial background today, is they’re very interested in funding professors and other social scientists to evaluate the results of these experiments, to see what happens with vouchers or extra money for smaller class size at public schools. And we have some results from them. And that’s again, the way democracy improves. And it wouldn’t improve as quickly if we just had the menus served up by, or at least shaped very heavily by the special interests in an area like education.

James Patterson (09:08):

Yeah. I just was flipping through trying to find, but I couldn’t, but, the section where you talk about Mark Zuckerberg donating a just eye-popping amount of money to a public school system with the impact being the sort of rearing back of declining test scores. And in this way, he’s operating kind of contrary to the instincts of, say, the teacher’s union, which is more about protecting teacher benefits.

John O. McGinnis (09:36):

Right. He’s doing that and he does it through public schools. And it does seem to help with math a bit. It just doesn’t seem to help that much with reading. And you then can compare it with other ideas of creating charter schools. He did it within New Jersey. I think it was like $200 million. It was a very large amount. I’m not sure how successful that turned out to be. I think it had some success, but one of the points I make in the book is not every intervention by the rich in public policy will be wise or will be successful, but that’s not the real point. The real point is they give a greater variety of interventions. And then particularly in our more empirically oriented world, and often funded by the rich themselves, we can evaluate the results of the experiments. And that’s one way democracy moves forward.

(10:28):

So even if Mark Zuckerberg didn’t completely succeed, the idea of putting different ideas on the table is an important one, and the rich are able to do that.

James Patterson (10:39):

So you describe in Why Democracy Needs the Rich the United States as a commercial republic, both in its founding and its operation after the founding. So how did the founders incorporate the rich into the regime and what role do you think they play in preserving a commercial republic?

John O. McGinnis (10:56):

Well, the rich were important. And one of the points I make, which I really hadn’t thought about is they’re important to the existence of the United States. I don’t think it’s sufficiently understood how the American Revolution depended in many ways on the wealthy John Hancock. We know, of course, from a signature on the Declaration…

James Patterson (11:17):

Haym Salomon. Yeah, there were tons of them.

John O. McGinnis (11:19):

They were crucial. We didn’t really have a Navy. It was really the rich people who actually created vessels as essentially entrepreneurship trying to capture British ships. So they’ve been very important since the beginning of the Republic. And moreover, it was the thought at the time, commerce was understood to have wide advantages over just actually creating wealth, which was also thought to be obviously advantageous in shaping the manners and making the manners of people better when they don’t have to worry putting about food on the table every day. That was thought to be an important way of improving society. But also by creating commerce, people are put in relations with one another of markets, so they really realize they have to do things for one another. And that’s a unifying aspect of society. And then even there was thought that we have commercial relations with other nations that created opportunities for peace and lessen the opportunity for war.

(12:28):

So commerce was thought to be an extremely valuable aspect of any society. And if you look at the US Constitution, a lot of it is about making a commercial Republic. Of course, the Commerce Clause allows Congress to get rid of state restrictions on commerce. And that’s really the concern. One of the greatest concerns about the Constitution was to do that. So at the very beginning, commerce was thought to be an ideal, was actually thought to promote some of the virtues of democracy, the manners of the people, the connections of the people in democracy, and the Constitution was structured to promote Congress. So very early on, commerce has been important. And it remains, I think, a mainstay of America today. It’s why America continues to be the innovator in the world. If you look, for instance, at issues of AI or the internet, it’s been essentially the United States that has created all of these essential enterprises that other nations in some sense free ride on our innovations.

(13:46):

It’s also true that in healthcare, the United States through its biomedical infrastructure is by far the leader in innovation and other countries help themselves to our discovery. So the idea of commerce was important to the Early Republic, and it continues to have benefits not only to the United States, but to the world as a whole. And so that’s the essential aspect of the United States as a commercial republic.

James Patterson (14:15):

I find that students are often unaware of some of those passages in the Constitution because they’re just so routinely followed. And one of them being the free trade among the states. This is something that was maybe not as obvious at the time of framing the Constitution, and we sort of reaped those benefits without thinking much about them.

John O. McGinnis (14:36):

That’s right. There’s no doubt that that was one of the motivations for the Constitution. And sometimes we don’t think that it’s the non-controversial aspects of the Constitution that really are our foundation. It’s not what we’re debating about the hard issues in the Constitution, but the consensus that everyone accepts on which our society is founded and is prospered. And the Commerce Clause is certainly, I think, foremost among those provisions.

James Patterson (15:08):

So the common view, this is maybe not the prevailing view, but it is a common view that the rich primarily used their wealth to engage in elaborate forms of consumption, like enormous yachts docked at Monaco or flying private jets to avoid a traffic jam. It’s sort of like the Taylor Swift, sort of … she takes a 20-minute flight to Burbank instead of driving. What do the rich do in markets that do not only satisfy their own needs, but improve the lives of everyone? We sort of already touched on this a little bit.

John O. McGinnis (15:41):

Well, it’s no doubt that some rich people spend a lot of money on conspicuous consumption. There’s absolutely no doubt about that, but there are two points I would make about that. First of all, it’s a very small proportion of the benefits they give every one of us. I mean, Jeff Bezos has a big yacht, but almost everyone today has the benefit of his daily deliveries that he experimented with. He created this economy that allowed people to get all sorts of goods delivered to their door, and that’s a huge benefit to people. So that’s one point I would make. Another one I would make is as well, the long-term trend of the rich, even despite their continuous conspicuous consumption, I think has been to equalize the actual living experience of middle-class people and the rich. Now, I leave the poor out of it for a moment.

(16:40):

We can come back to that, who I think is a problem of lack of skills and participation in the economy. But I compare myself, for instance, a professor to Peter Thiel and compare the closeness of experience, our relative closeness of experience to some duke in the seventeenth century and some don at Oxford. The world that Thiel and I inhabit is a much more similar world. We do many more of the same things. One reason is that one of the things that rich have done with their innovations and entrepreneurship, they’ve kind of dematerialized the world. I have access to the same information that Thiel does. I can get essentially a chauffeur by my phone to get me to wherever I want to go. These are innovations that have come from people who are now wealthy, and they actually, I think, mean that our experience is much more similar.

(17:42):

And I think this is going to continue, actually. I think we’re going to see a dematerialization in a way that people, well, I can imagine 20, 30 years from now, have almost the experience of being on a huge yacht that isn’t all that different from Jeff Bezos’. So I certainly acknowledge there’s conspicuous consumption as there always has been with the rich, but I think it’s less actually different than the middle class than it once was and that they give tremendous benefits. Another thing they do, which I talk about in the book is that they kind of are prospectors. They go out and do things that no one else would imagine doing. This one fellow who tries to optimize his health with all sorts of resources that he has and then publishes all the data on that. That’s something that an ordinary individual of ordinary wealth could not do, and yet that’s a benefit.

(18:44):

So some ways to think about rich people are kind of prospectors. Some of their ideas turn out to be crazy and maybe actually make their lives shorter and less pleasant, but other ideas redound to our benefit. So I think you have to think of the whole ecosystem of the rich and not just focus on their conspicuous consumption, which is a shiny thing that maybe get people excited. Of course, envy is a fact of life. It’s a part of the human condition. But I think when you think through things, there’s less reason to be envious than ever before, even a very rich people.

James Patterson (19:24):

So in Why Democracy Needs the Rich You explain how the rich are central to the formation of associations that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was vital to the preservation of political liberty and modern democracies. So this is not a function that people normally assume the rich really participate in. So why don’t you explain to the listener how they do that?

John O. McGinnis (19:44):

Well, the rich people, again, so setting up an association is itself a risky enterprise, and the rich people bring their social capital and their real capital to that. And throughout American history, they’ve been important to setting up associations, the YMCA or organizations like that, which the rich still contribute. We go from rich people in the nineteenth century to doing that, to Bezos’ divorced wife contributing to enterprises like that. And so they’re always important in that respect to get the seed capital, to sometimes bring in capital to refurbish these organizations when some of them fall on hard times. And then we also have a real problem in the modern world is actually affluence has made it harder to get other people to volunteer for organizations. And the reason I think basically for that is there’s just a lot more opportunities. You can look at cable TV, you can do all sorts of entertainment activities.

(20:54):

And that means that sometimes associations are not as attractive to people, and the rich actually make them more attractive by actually not paying people, but paying people in kind to associate. So if you join some environmental organizations, you get a big payoff from

(21:16):

organized trips, which sometimes the organization helps fund, funded by wealthy people. So those are ways that they actually use their money to substitute or to encourage more associations than would happen in our rather individualistic world, in our world where people have so many opportunities today to do other things than Tocqueville saw on the frontier, when of course, reading groups and groups of self-improvement associations of the kind that are talked about in the Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder  that dominated towns in the nineteenth century have fallen into harder times. The rich provide some substitutes for that in the modern world.

James Patterson (22:08):

Yeah. And they also, in that same chapter you talk about how … And this was kind of counterintuitive for me, so I wanted to ask you about it. They also buck a kind of conformity that democracies fall into. What do you think accounts for that?

John O. McGinnis (22:26):

Well, Tocqueville was really worried about conformity. So one thing I’m honest about in this book is democracy has its virtues. It certainly is the worst system but for all the others, which Churchill praised it with, but it has weaknesses. And Tocqueville, who is our greatest theorist of democracy, saw those. And one thing he worried about was conformity. That what democracy does is it gives the majority the opportunity to sort of worship itself. What their preferences are, are really God’s preferences. And it turns out obviously enough that some of their preferences turn out, at least in retrospect, to be sort of terrible. And the rich have a kind of independence because one reason that even you don’t want to be too far from the majority is that curtails your opportunities and gets the majority angry at you, particularly if it’s something that’s kind of the core of their beliefs.

(23:29):

But the rich, again, have independence, networks, and resources that make them less likely to be conformist. And we’ve seen that. I think one of the greatest examples of that is, well, the Founding itself was an example as I noted of that, but one of the greatest examples is the abolitionist movement. That is funded very heavily by the rich. I talk about the Tappan Brothers at that time who paid a great deal of price. They were burned in effigy. Some of their houses were burned down. That’s something that they could endure because they had a lot of resources. Of course, some people just wanted to continue to associate with them because they themselves gave opportunities, and they were very important voices in that. And that’s true in the women’s rights movement as well, even to some extent in the civil rights movement. Now, I don’t want to say that one of the things I want to be careful of is saying that the rich are the only group that’s necessary to democracy.

(24:36):

They were catalysts to other movements. They were catalysts to other people. It was crucial that politicians, that African Americans themselves, played very important roles. So I don’t want to be understood as saying that the rich themselves created were the abolitionist movement, but they were important catalysts for it and other movements for justice that went against majority views because abolitionism, even if slavery was not very popular, abolitionism wasn’t very popular either for a long time in the United States. And so these abolitionist societies were catalysts of a movement that, of course, ultimately resulted in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Of course, amendments that I think are correctly understood to be a new birth of freedom in the United States. And people like the Tappan Brothers played a very important role, and it’s hard to believe they would’ve played that role, but for their independence and wealth.

James Patterson (25:41):

So we are both academics, and so I think we see up close a little bit more the work that rich people do in philanthropy, and I don’t think it gets a lot of popular attention. So why don’t you speak a little bit about philanthropy and the way that it influences the lives of so many people?

John O. McGinnis (26:03):

Well, so philanthropy happens at a variety of levels. Some happens again at the level of experimenting with ways of trying to help poor individuals. So Gates Foundation has been very, had a lot of efforts to help homeless people in a different way from most governments, in a way that tries to follow them and I think tries to get them up on their feet in a way they hope is going to be much more effective. So there is a lot of what I would call social welfare spending by the rich. I think even more important is the way that they create different centers within universities because we see, I think, firsthand, and this goes back again to the homogeneous views problem of universities, that we’re educating the next generation and of course the elite of the next generation in universities. And yet, unfortunately at many, if not most elite universities, there’s really not a diversity of views on social matters.

(27:17):

And it’s the rich who are really very important in creating that diversity with their philanthropy. So it’s a remarkable to look at the Federalist Society at law schools, but let’s take a look at what I would call the civic center movement in the United States.

James Patterson (27:38):

Tread carefully, John, that’s my job!

John O. McGinnis (27:41):

No, I’m delighted to give a plug for it. But let’s think about how I think one of the crucial ways, again, the catalyst to that movement.

(27:52):

Many of the current civic institutes within universities that have create different and more diverse and diverse perspectives even within them are funded by the states. But I think it is fair to say that the original civic center was a private center and that became in some ways the model. And that is Robbie George’s Madison Institute at Princeton University, and that did not depend on any state money. It depended on foundations, wealthy foundations, nationals like the Bradley Foundations. And because of that and because of Robbie’s great entrepreneurial skills, this became a model that, again, had influenced throughout the country. And so what’s one of the most interesting aspects of the wealthy is not focusing just on their general philanthropy, but again, the way that they offer a lot of different kinds of philanthropic enterprises. And some of the enterprises don’t really catch fire, but what’s important, and that’s true, a lot of companies don’t catch fire.

(29:07):

There are a lot of bankruptcies, there are a lot of things that are unproductive, but the ones that do catch fire, those change society, and it’s worth having the rich being these prospectors. And I think the civic education movement within universities is a very important one, and I do not think would’ve come to its certainly the same kind of fruition without, again, the catalyst of wealthy philanthropy in the form of the Madison Institute.

James Patterson (29:41):

Between me being a James Madison postdoc and the civic center I work for here at the Institute of American Civics at University of Tennessee, I basically owe my entire career to Robbie George.

John O. McGinnis (29:53):

And Robbie, I think I would acknowledge that he couldn’t have done it without the resources of wealthy foundations. I’m sure he would acknowledge that. I mean, he’s, again, I think an amazing academic entrepreneur, but unless he was individually wealthy, he could not have set up the infrastructure that he has without help.

James Patterson (30:14):

Exactly right. So the argument against the influence of the rich in politics, less true today, but it’s primarily from the left. But what’s strange is that there are a lot of wealthy people on the left who fund foundations to propagate this view. So is the argument really that the wrong rich people have a voice and that really only the rich on the left should be the ones influencing democracy? Is that what’s really going on here?

John O. McGinnis (30:43):

Well, sometimes I think that’s what’s going on, but another time I think there may be a more insidious and yet an argument that’s more likely to actually help the left more, which is if you get rid of the rich influence entirely, whose influence are you left with? You’re left with the clerisy’s influence. And so it’s not that the rich, and this is some arguments I get as an attack on my perspective from the right is, well, they point out there are a lot of left wing rich people. And that’s absolutely true and that they spend money on politics, Soros, Tom Steyer, high school classmate of mine as it happened.

James Patterson (31:31):

No way. Really?

John O. McGinnis (31:32):

But a lot of rich people spend money on that. That’s absolutely true. And they have philanthropic enterprises that conservatives don’t like. All absolutely true. But the question is, in the absence of that, we actually see academics as heterogeneous as has happened because of the resources the conservatives have put in. And this is a basic economic point. At the margin, the dollars of rich conservatives make a lot more difference than the dollars of rich left-wing people because the left-wing people already have the infrastructure of the clerisy. And if you believe, as I do, that one of the great virtues of democracy is that once ideas are able to circulate, even ordinary people get the idea, well, maybe this idea is better than the other idea. So the real danger to the right is to have their ideas not substantially participate in the public sphere.

(32:41):

The wealthy conservatives are much more important in assuring that that doesn’t happen. The wealthy liberals, they’re not necessary for that to be assured. And so that’s the basic difference between the role that … So I might’ve been able, at least at our time, to entitle the book, Why the Conservative Wealthy Are Needed to Democracy, but you can’t choose. You can’t choose. The government can’t make ideological distinctions like that. It’s the entire class of wealthy despite their, and maybe because of their heterogeneous views, help democracy because they make sure that views that aren’t what the clerisy are interested in have a voice.

James Patterson (33:33):

So at the end of the book, you actually take aim at some of the New Right critics of democracy. You describe Patrick Deneen’s conception of aristo-populism, kind of creation of a political class that’s supposed to be aligned with ordinary Americans’ interests. So is the problem with aristo-populist in your view that the rich can’t be them, or is Deneen simply wrong about what kind of people should serve in office?

John O. McGinnis (33:56):

Well, I think the problem with Deneen is he has no idea of who this group is going to be. So I don’t think it’s going to be the clerisy, right? I don’t think that’s where he’s going to get his shock troop for his regime change. So the point I just make in the book is if his vision succeeds, and I’m not necessarily a great fan of it, he needs the wealthy as well. And there are actually wealthy individuals, the founder of Dominio’s Pizza, for instance, who’ve tried to create worlds like his around Ava Maria and a town that is sympathetic to, I would call very traditional conservative values. They’re going to depend on the wealthy as well. So my argument is that they really shouldn’t be as down on the wealthy as some of them are because they really don’t have another group. So many of them, I think, are hoping that they’re in a different world.

(34:59):

The first attack on liberalism was from people like Joseph de Maistre who thought, well, we can revive the throne and altar. And that was a potential. You could imagine maybe at that time that is an elite group that would counter liberalism with a small-L, but that’s completely implausible today. And so I think they’re dependent for any hopes they have, even on the wealthy. Now, whether they succeed or not, I don’t know. And again, I’m not tremendously enthusiastic about their movement, but I think my point is they depend on the wealthy as well. There’s no other elite for them, and they’ve got some members of that who are going to put forward some of their ideas, and that’s fine with me.

James Patterson (35:50):

So just to conclude, something that I found to be a surprise in the book, something I didn’t expect in the least, was the attention that you pay to the potential for technological change, especially in the form of AI. So lingering in the background is this issue of AI. What does this have to do with the relationship between rich democracy?

John O. McGinnis (36:13):

Well, I ended this on the idea was, I thought I should not just talk about the past, but the future. And I think that for better or for worse, AI is going to be our future. We could maybe have another podcast on that. And I don’t think it’s possible for the United States to give up the leadership in AI because AI is so close to military and national security power. So it’s absolutely essential that the United States be the leader in AI. And again, I think the rich play a very important role in keeping us as the leader with their entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial culture, investing in risky matters. So they do that. But I also think AI is risky. I think AI does pose risk to maybe humanity. I’m not sure about that, but I think there’s some possibility of that. And I don’t think it’s going to be the government is going to figure out a way to get around these risks.

(37:20):

They don’t have the information, the talent. And one of the things I’m impressed by is how many of the wealthy are setting up institutes that are just devoted to thinking about how are we going to align AI with human flourishing? How are we going to keep it safe? And they played an essential role in that as well. And again, almost all of these institutes are coming from American, very wealthy Americans in the United States. So it’s both that they push ahead AI, which is the alternative is not to have AI, but they have AI developed by the Chinese or even worse actors on the international scene, but they’re also aware of some of the risks and they’re with their philanthropy trying to meet them. Whether they’ll be successful, I’m not sure. I think AI is by far the most important issue when we’re talking about things like affordability.

(38:22):

My prediction is by 2032, at least, maybe even before, the biggest issue in politics will be AI.

James Patterson (38:31):

The book is Why Democracy Needs the Rich. The guest John O. McGinnis. Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

John O. McGinnis (38:40):

Delighted to be here. Thanks so much.

James Patterson (38:43):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.