tiny group of men and women of different nationalities, religions, origins, but all similar to each other in their energy, greed, contempt for the weak, indifference to the common good, blindness to the fate of the planet and the fate of the people who live on it.1 Every day, the media run articles and news reports about powerful lobby groups that influence politics and perhaps even dictate which legislation governments should pass. The battle between mavericks (the good guys), who uncover sinister conspiracies initiated by powerful corporations (the bad guys, frequently the capitalist puppet masters of corrupt politicians), is a common Hollywood trope. In American election campaigns it is widely accepted that if you want to become President, you can only succeed if you are able to raise billions of dollars in donations – from Wall Street, from powerful pharmaceutical and defence companies, from the weapons lobby, from very large unions and other special interest groups. In the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists, politics is controlled by left-wing billionaires such as George Soros, while from the point of view of left-wing conspiracy theorists, the strings are pulled by libertarian billionaires such as the Koch brothers. Even the media are in the pockets of a handful of plutocrats. The Washington Post, for example, has belonged to one of the richest men in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, since 2013. In the face of this overwhelming evidence, there is surely no doubt: money rules! And that is not all: critics of ‘social inequality’ claim that the problem is getting worse. With rising inequality, the influence exerted by the rich on politics is said to be growing. More than a decade ago, the economist Paul Krugman (2011) wrote in The New York Times that we live in a “society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only”. His colleague Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, asserted in his collection of essays, The Great Divide, that politics “increasingly represents the interests of the 1 percent” (Stiglitz, 2015, p. xix). Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most well-known critic of capitalism in the US, writes that “the real concentration of power is in a fraction of 1 percent” of the population: “They get exactly what they want, because they're basically running the place” (Chomsky, 2015, p. 140). If the rich were so omnipotent and were increasingly strengthening their grasp on power, we would expect them to be very satisfied with recent political developments. In Germany at least, however, this is by no means the case. The tenor is pessimistic. Today, [Germany] is still in a healthy position – not least thanks to companies as the engines of society – but if countermeasures are not initiated soon, this status is in danger of being forfeited as a result of prevarication and wrong-headedness on the part of politicians … Mendacity, incompetence, egoism – such accusations and disparaging remarks against leading politicians are frequently heard from within the ranks of Germany's business elite. (2015, p. 129) After almost 16 years of Merkel, Germany is, in so many respects, a basket case. There are shortcomings almost everywhere you look: our bureaucracy is stuck in the fax age, there's a digitalisation backlog, a high-speed internet blackhole, massive deficiencies in infrastructure and ailing schools. And these are just a handful of examples of failings that are shameful for a leading industrial nation. (Boldt, 2021) With these comments, Reitzle was addressing issues that are important not only for the economy, but for society as a whole. They have long been neglected – and not only by Germany's political elite. In countries across the Western world, social spending has massively increased over the last few decades, while far too little has been spent on infrastructure and education. If ‘big business’ really set the political agenda, then political priorities would certainly be very different. The exasperation with politics and politicians expressed by the German business elite is all too understandable. I benefited from an insider's perspective for 15 years because I was the owner of a leading public relations consultancy. Our clients included two of the German real estate industry's leading associations (‘lobbyists’), the Immobilienverband Deutschland (which we advised for 14 years) and the German Property Federation – ZIA (which we advised for eight years). During these years, I never had even the slightest impression that powerful companies were determining the government's policy agenda. Quite the opposite. Real estate companies and associations were in a constant defensive struggle against politicians who were making life ever more difficult for them. The work of the industry's ‘lobbyists’ was not that of pushing a business-centric agenda, but rather a constant battle to prevent what they saw as the worst from happening. Where I had direct insight into the workings of politics, the associations did not wield great influence. Far from it. They usually failed to get the government to accept their proposals or recognise their problems in planned legislation. For example, the associations constantly suggested measures to streamline the building code, but the opposite has happened – there are now, unbelievably, 25,000 different regulations in German building law. Of course, the associations would proudly trumpet each minor victory. There is a peculiar congruence of interests here: critics of capitalism are eager to paint business lobbyists as being all-powerful, and the lobby groups themselves have an interest in presenting themselves as being more powerful than they really are. They are, after all, under pressure from the elevated expectations of their members, who are all too often disappointed when their lobbyists do not achieve more, and who often fail to understand the ins and outs of political decision-making processes. It is an essential characteristic of pluralistic societies that various interest groups – companies, labour unions, environmental organisations – all advocate their interests and points of view. The fact that the rich also have a part to play in trying to shape the political agenda is not necessarily deserving of criticism, whatever opponents may say. In the past, Prussia and other states had a three-class electoral system in which the votes of citizens who paid more tax counted for more than those who paid little or no tax. Those days are long gone. But the fact that the rich – mostly entrepreneurs – try to ensure that their voice as a minority within society is heard is just as legitimate as it is for other groups. Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, democracy does not equate to the unrestricted rule of the majority over the minority, not even over the rich. This would be a Marxist-Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, not a pluralist democracy. The United States is generally regarded as a country in which the rich exert a particularly strong influence over political developments. For years, anti-capitalist politicians such as Bernie Sanders, a formally non-partisan senator, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a left-wing Democrat, have been beating the drum about the ever-increasing influence of the rich on American politics. But if money alone bought political power, Donald Trump would never have been the Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2016. That honour would more likely have gone to Jeb Bush, who was able to raise far more in political donations. Even Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, political scientists and two of the most prominent proponents of the thesis that US politics is determined by the rich, concede that “most of the big-money contributors – and most Republican think-tankers and officeholders – supported other candidates”. Moreover “Trump's positions went directly contrary to the views of wealthy donors and wealthy Americans generally” (Page & Gilens, 2017, pp. 100–1). Furthermore, if money determined political outcomes, Trump would never have won the 2016 election. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would have triumphed, as Page and Gilens recognise: “The better-funded candidate sometimes loses, as Hillary Clinton herself did” (2017, p. 104). Clinton and her allies, including her joint committees, the Democratic Party, and the Political Action Committees that supported her, raised more than $1.2 billion for the full campaign, according to her final campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission (Allison et al., 2016). Trump and his allies only collected about $600 million. Interestingly, “not one CEO in the Fortune 100 donated to Trump's election campaign by September 2016. His victory did not stem from influence by the wealthy but more from grassroots opposition to wealthy coastal elites” (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 22). If money alone could buy political power, then Joe Biden would also not have been nominated or become President. Perhaps the White House would have gone instead to the wealthy entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg, who at the time of his application for the Democratic candidacy was the eighth-richest man in the world, worth $61.9 billion according to Forbes (Kamarck, 2020). In all likelihood, Bloomberg spent more of his own money (and spent it quicker) on his election campaign than any other candidate in history – almost $1 billion in just over three months, as revealed in Federal Election Commission filings on campaign financing (Allison & Niquette, 2020). Unusually, Bloomberg financed his campaign himself and did not accept any donations. Bloomberg is by no means the only candidate whose wealth did not enable him to realise his political ambitions. Republican Steve Forbes spent $69.2 million on his bids for the 1996 and 2000 nominations, but won only a handful of delegates; in 2020, billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer put up $200 million of his own fortune and ended up without a single delegate (Kamarck, 2020). In the 2008 Republican primaries, Mitt Romney spent more than twice as much as John McCain – much of which was his own money – but dropped out of the race in February leaving McCain to go on to secure the Republican nomination (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 25). The Koch brothers have always been portrayed by critics of capitalism as among the most dangerous pro-capitalists on the planet, but David Koch learned just how hard it is to turn money into political power back in 1980, when he was one of the main supporters of the Libertarian Party and threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for Vice-President: he earned just 1 per cent of the vote (Page & Gilens, 2017, p. 98). In the history of American elections, some Democratic candidates have tended to raise money from large donors, and others, such as Bernie Sanders, have relied far more on smaller donations. In the 2016 primaries, 60 per cent of donations to the Sanders campaign came from people who gave less than $200 (Page & Gilens, 2017, p. 96). The same is true for Republican candidates. Barry Goldwater and Patrick Buchanan, for example, both mobilised large numbers of small donors, whereas candidates such as Jeb Bush were supported primarily by large donors. while money is critical to inform the public and give all views a hearing, this election proves once again that money can't make voters like the views they hear. Jeb Bush is not the only lavishly funded candidate to drop out of the race … The evil of ‘money in politics’ is vastly overstated. Larry M. Bartels (2017) criticised inequality and the influence of the wealthy in the US in his book Unequal Democracy. He examined the estimated effect of unequal campaign spending in 16 US presidential elections from 1952 to 2012, noting that “Republican candidates outspent their Democratic opponents in 13 of those elections”. But in only two elections, namely that of Richard Nixon in 1968 and that of George W. Bush in 2000, did Bartels conclude that “Republican candidates won close elections that they very likely would have lost had they been unable to outspend their Democratic opponents” (2017, p. 98). And with Hillary Clinton – as shown above – raising considerably more in donations than Donald Trump in the 2016 election, there were just two out of 17 elections since 1958 in which unequal campaign spending was the decisive factor in an election. Nevertheless, the ‘money makes the world go round’ assumption remains popular, especially in the United States. One of the most frequently cited academic studies purporting to prove the power of money in the US is the 2013 paper ‘Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans’ by Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels and Jason Seawright. It is surprising that this paper is repeatedly cited as evidence of the extent to which the wealthy determine politics. After all, with only 83 respondents, the research base for a quantitative study was very small. Moreover, all of the study's respondents came from the Chicago metropolitan area. Furthermore, many of the respondents did not really qualify as super-rich: only 36 of the 83 owned assets worth more than $10 million.2 The Page et al. study relates to data collected in 2011. It would certainly be interesting to find out, more than ten years later, whether the wealthy respondents got what they wished for from America's politicians. As the title of their study indicates, these researchers wanted to identify the policy preferences of wealthy Americans. Of 11 items mentioned by the respondents, budget deficits were of greatest concern. Thus, from the perspective of 87 per cent of this sample of the wealthy, this was the biggest issue that US policymakers should be addressing. In last place, scoring only 16 per cent, was climate change. The authors concluded that “the contemporary emphasis in Washington on reducing the federal budget deficit addresses what is, by far, the most important problem in the minds of wealthy Americans – though not of the American public as whole” (Page et al., 2013, p. 68). Ten years after the study, the national debt, the reduction of which was the top goal of the wealthy in America according to this survey, had risen from $15.6 trillion to $28.4 trillion, not far off doubling. At the time of the survey, national debt stood at just under 100 per cent of US GDP; today it is more than 133 per cent. If, above all, the rich wanted to see a significant reduction in the national debt, they did not get it from Barack Obama or Donald Trump – and certainly not from Joe Biden. Indeed, Joe Biden's political agenda is dominated by the very issue that wealthy Americans mentioned least frequently in the survey, namely the fight against climate change via the Green New Deal (which goes hand in hand with a significant rise in the national debt). So, do the rich exert any influence on politics? Of course they do, but less so on the big-ticket issues that are the subject of heated public debate and that determine the overall direction of policy. The authors of the Page et al. study cited above found that just under half (44 per cent) of the survey's participants acknowledged that their priorities focused on fairly narrow economic self-interest rather than the ‘big issues’. The authors cite, for example: trying “to get the Treasury to honor their commitment to extend TARP funding to a particular bank in Chicago”, “to better understand the new regulations of the Dodd–Frank Act and how it will affect my business [banking/finance]”, “Fish and wildlife … permitting on development land” or “seeking regulatory approvals” for their clients (Page et al., 2013, p. 54). Constraining government would also have the advantage of reducing the amount of money in politics … Getting rid of regulations that distort the free market and rig the game for the politically connected, cutting wasteful government contracts and kickbacks for cronies, and calling out politicians who engage in these practices would stanch the river of cash flowing to D.C. at its source. (York, 2017) There is no evidence that the influence of the affluent on major policy outcomes has increased as income inequality has grown. Contrary to what one would expect from reading the studies on inequality and democracy, spending on welfare programs benefiting the poor has gone up dramatically and the tax burden on the wealthy has increased in recent decades. (York, 2017) In the United States, which is always held up as a particularly stark example of glaring and rising inequality, social spending as a share of GDP rose from 9.6 to 14.3 per cent between 1980 and 2018, a 50 per cent increase (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 24). In his 2012 book Affluence and Influence, Martin Gilens argued that wealthier voters hold greater sway over politics in the United States than voters from lower income groups. He examined 1,923 questions from public opinion polls conducted in the US between 1981 and 2002, supplemented by datasets from 1964 to 1968 and 2005/06 (Gilens, 2012, pp. 57, 53). He proceeded to analyse the political views of members of lower-, middle- and upper-income groups and then compared their responses in opinion polls with government policies in the years following each election. He highlighted what he called ‘representational inequality’, which he claimed to be evident in the fact that the opinions of the lower- and, in some cases, middle-income groups had less chance of being implemented by the government than those of the upper-income group. It is worth noting, however, that while this ‘representational inequality’ applies to religious issues, foreign policy and economic policy, it does not apply to social welfare. As Gilens acknowledged, “The social welfare domain is the only policy domain examined in which the divergence of preferences across income groups does not lead to a substantial decline in responsiveness to the preferences of less-well-off Americans”. According to Gilens, this was because “poor and middle-income Americans have powerful allies that tend to share their preferences on these issues”, such as the American Association of Retired Persons, one of the most influential lobbying groups in the United States (Gilens, 2012, p. 121). In the domain of economic policy, on the other hand, Gilens reported that the opinions of lower-income groups are less likely to be heard. What policies did Gilens think would lead to “greater representational equality in the economic sphere”? He suggested that to address representational inequality, policies would have to “result in a higher minimum wage, more generous unemployment benefits, stricter corporate regulation … and a more progressive personal tax regime in general” (Gilens, 2012, p. 117). But whether a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich and stricter regulation are necessarily in the interests of the working classes is open to doubt. The two American presidents who have been most vehemently castigated in recent decades for one-sidedly representing the interests of the rich and for cutting too much red tape are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Both indeed pushed through substantial tax cuts for the rich and they deregulated in some areas, but this arguably helped low-income earners more – by boosting jobs and in many cases earnings – than many policies which were explicitly aimed at supporting them. The American Dream of income mobility, which for many today is felt to have turned into a nightmare of discontent, was alive and well in the 1980s: 86 per cent of households that were in the poorest income quintile in 1981 had moved up the economic ladder into a higher quintile by 1990. The percentage of poor households that moved all the way up to the richest income quintile between 1981 and 1990 was indeed slightly higher than the percentage of those who remained in the poorest quintile. The number of Americans earning less than $10,000 a year fell by 5 per cent during the 1980s, while the number of those earning more than $50,000 rose by 60 per cent, and the number of those whose annual income exceeded $75,000 rose by a staggering 83 per cent (Niskanen & Moore, 1996, p. 20). There are many myths about the Reagan years, such as the persistent – and pernicious – claim that wealthy whites were the sole beneficiaries of Reagan's policies at the expense of poorer African Americans. During Donald Trump's presidency – at least before the coronavirus pandemic – unemployment in the United States fell to an all-time low, and the economic situation improved for low-income earners, African Americans and Latinos, factors that allowed Trump, in his second presidential election campaign in 2020, to make significant gains among these groups of voters who have traditionally shunned the Republicans. So the claims made by critics of capitalism that policies that benefit the rich must be bad for the poor do not stand up to scrutiny. But what about the observation that most members of the United States Congress are themselves very wealthy? “Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive … By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent”, as Joseph Stiglitz points out (Stiglitz, 2015, p. 92). To what extent does their personal wealth influence the policies of these decision-makers? Taken together, the analyses described above suggest that legislators' personal interests and preferences can shape their congressional voting, but that concern over the growing wealth of members of Congress is probably misplaced. At least in terms of economic policy broadly conceived, liberals and conservatives are equally likely to be found among Congress's wealthiest members and among those with the fewest resources. It's impossible to say with any confidence whether U.S. representatives would behave differently if their salaries put them in the middle of the U.S. income distribution rather than towards the top. But it does appear that the substantial existing differences in economic status among members of Congress are not related to broad patterns of voting on economic policy. (Gilens, 2012, p. 238) A wealthy politician is often far more independent and unfettered in their decision-making than one who is entirely dependent on their party. One example from Germany would be the long-serving Christian Social Union representative Peter Gauweiler, who is a brilliant lawyer and frequently registered the highest income of all members of the German parliament, the Bundestag. His financial independence enabled him to follow his own convictions and to hold opinions that did not toe the party line. A representative who has spent their entire life in politics – and can do nothing else – does not have this intrinsic independence. In earlier times, wealth was actually an explicit requirement for holding political office. From the first days of Rome all the way through the Roman Republic and the imperial period up to late antiquity, it was wealth above all that determined a citizen's position and influence. The economic elite always doubled up as the political elite. For example, Emperor Augustus stipulated that only those who possessed one million sesterces could become senators; 400,000 sesterces were the prerequisite for entering the nobility. The problem with many parliaments today is surely not that too many entrepreneurs are active in them, but quite the opposite. After the 2017 federal elections in Germany, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article under the headline ‘Twice as Many Entrepreneurs in the Bundestag’ (FAZ, 2017). Their number had risen from just 35 in the previous legislative period to 76 in the 2017 elections (out of 706 representatives). More economic expertise and more entrepreneurial thinking might certainly make politics better rather than worse. In the Bundestag elected in 2021, the share of entrepreneurs among newly elected representatives fell from 2 per cent to 1.4 per cent (Welt, 2021). Arguably, if the rich in Western countries can be reproached, it is not for being excessively involved in politics, but for not being involved enough. This is perhaps particularly true for those rich people who are also advocates of capitalism. While the voices of critics of capitalism such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, who vehemently argue for higher taxes on the rich, can be heard loudly, supporters of capitalism rarely speak out in public. Page and Gilens speak of the ‘public silence of most billionaires’. David Koch, who provided financial support for libertarian viewpoints, made just one public comment of his own on tax policy in a ten-year period; his brother Charles Koch made no public comment at all on these issues (Page & Gilens, 2017, p. 106). The public silence of most billionaires contrasts markedly with the willingness of a small, unusual group of billionaires – including Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates – to speak out about specific public policies … All three have favored a substantial social safety net, progressive taxes, and moderate regulation of the economy. An ordinary American who tried to judge what U.S. billionaires think and do about politics by listening to Bloomberg, Buffett, or Gates would be badly misled. (2017, p. 106) The relationship between money and political power can be a real problem in countries where wealth does not depend primarily on entrepreneurial ideas, but on political influence and access to the levers of power. The more power the state has, the more likely it is that lobbyism and corruption will flourish. Countries with overly powerful governments also tend to be countries with rampant corruption. Russia, for instance, ranks a poor 136th (out of 180) in the Corruption Perceptions Index for 2021 (Transparency International, 2021). In the Heritage Foundation's 2022 Index of Economic Freedom (Miller et al., 2022), Russia is a distant 113th. From countries such as Russia, it is clear that we need more – not less – capitalism where the ties between business and politics are too close. Many people associate ‘capitalism’ with ‘corruption’. But, as the economist Alan H. Meltzer wrote: “Offenses such as bribery can be either public or private and are common in many nations, but they are most common where government officials have the most authority” (Meltzer, 2012, p. 13). The view that corruption is particularly prevalent in capitalist countries is wrong. The opposite is true, as confirmed by a comparison of the Corruption Perceptions Index and the Index of Economic Freedom. The Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation since 1995, is widely regarded as a capitalism ranking. According to the index, the countries with the lowest levels of corruption also have the highest degree of economic freedom. The ten countries with the least corruption are all, without exception, in the Index's ‘free’ or ‘mostly free’ categories: Singapore, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland and the Netherlands are among the ten most corruption-free countries in the world – and they are all among the ten most economically free countries! Conversely, countries in the bottom ten of the Corruption Perceptions Index are also classed as ‘repressed’ in the Index of Economic Freedom. The two worst performers in the 2022 Index of Economic Freedom, Venezuela and North Korea, are also among the worst performers in the Corruption Perceptions Index. The more the state intervenes in economic life, the greater the opportunities to bribe government officials. Anyone who wants to limit unethical or even criminal influence on political policy by the wealthy should therefore not advocate for bigger, but for smaller government. I recently visited Georgia, a country where corruption used to be endemic. I met the economist Professor Gia Jandieri, an instrumental figure in the fight against corruption, who explained the most effective anti-corruption measures (apart from dismissing all 35,000 or so police officers in one fell swoop): “At least as important for fighting corruption was that reforms eliminated many superfluous regulations and rules”. This provides a key lesson for other countries: cutting government regulation also reduces opportunities for corruption. In 2004, Georgia ranked as low as 133rd in the Corruption Perceptions Index. By 2021, it had climbed to 45th out of 180. Those who want to limit the influence of the rich should first and foremost limit the power of government and the political class. After all, it is only when the government strengthens its grip on the distribution of economic resources that the rich are more likely to try to gain influence or even bribe politicians. And we should resist the narrative that insists that the public interest is constantly under pressure from big business and the super-wealthy. For there is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all-powerful. Interestingly, a poll in numerous countries showed that anti-capitalists are significantly more prone to conspiracy theories than pro-capitalists (Zitelmann, 2023, ch. 14).