Trillionaire

 It occurs to me that the existence of a few multimillionaires or trillionaires in the world might not be a bad idea, doing things the political system can't manage or hems itself in too much.  Just have it be in a country with rule of law.

Yes—I think there is a serious case for that, with a rather important qualification: the useful thing isn't extreme wealth itself, but the freedom to deploy enormous resources outside the normal political machinery.

There are things governments are structurally bad at doing. They have electoral cycles, bureaucratic jurisdictions, procurement rules, competing constituencies, and an understandable fear of doing something spectacularly wrong with public money. A very wealthy individual can say, in effect, “I think this is worth trying; I'll spend $5 billion and see what happens.” If it fails, the taxpayer hasn't lost $5 billion.

That can produce genuinely unusual experiments in science, medicine, education, conservation, space exploration, infrastructure, and so forth. Andrew Carnegie is an interesting historical example: enormous private wealth was converted into institutions—libraries, universities, research organizations—that governments of his day were unlikely to have created in the same fashion.

But your qualification about rule of law is doing a lot of work. The danger isn't simply that a billionaire has too much money. It is that money can become a means of escaping the constraints that ordinarily apply to everyone else: buying political influence, controlling media, intimidating regulators, acquiring monopolies, or simply making the government dependent upon the wealthy person.

There's also an intriguing asymmetry here. We ordinarily think of democracy as protecting society from the arbitrary power of one person. But democracy can also make it difficult for one person to undertake something ambitious and unconventional. A society may therefore benefit from having a few people with enough independent resources to say, “I'm going to try this, and you don't have to vote for it.”

The ideal arrangement might therefore be something like private power plus public law: let somebody have astonishingly large resources, let him take enormous risks with his own money, but make sure that he cannot buy exemption from the law.

And there's a lovely irony in your formulation: perhaps the best place to have a trillionaire is precisely a country where the trillionaire isn't powerful enough to rewrite the rules.

Balance

Exactly. Balance is the word.

Too little private power, and society can become timid: everything has to pass through institutions designed primarily to prevent mistakes.

Too much private power, and you get oligarchy: the rich don't merely have freedom to experiment; they acquire the ability to determine the rules everyone else lives under.

The sweet spot is something like “You may do almost anything with your own resources, but you may not purchase sovereignty.”

That also suggests an important distinction between wealth and power. A person can have $100 billion and spend it building telescopes, funding basic research, restoring wetlands, or attempting some wonderfully eccentric project. That's quite different from having $100 billion and being able to tell the courts, legislature, press, or police what to do.

In fact, a healthy rule-of-law society might deliberately tolerate a surprisingly large amount of economic inequality precisely because it has mechanisms preventing economic inequality from automatically becoming political inequality.

The difficult part, of course, is keeping those mechanisms strong enough that the balance survives the arrival of the first genuinely clever, determined billionaire who decides he'd rather own the referee than play the game.

The real worry to me is when the wealthy of this sort own the press, as the Murdochs would do.  Usually efforts to win elections by throwing a lot of money at it is counterproductive.

Yes. I think you've identified a much more consequential danger than simply “a rich person has too much money.”

Buying political advertising is one thing; owning a substantial part of the information environment is another. Advertising is recognizably persuasion. A newspaper, television network, or online news organization can influence what people know exists, what gets investigated, what gets repeated, and which facts acquire a frame. That is much harder for the ordinary voter to compensate for.

News Corp and the Murdoch family are a particularly useful example, because their influence has historically operated through a collection of media outlets rather than simply through campaign contributions. That gives an owner something considerably more durable than an election campaign: the ability to shape the political conversation between elections.

And I agree with your second point. There are diminishing returns, and sometimes negative returns, to simply pouring money into an election. Voters aren't blank slates waiting for the largest advertising budget to write on them. Saturation can produce annoyance, suspicion, or even a kind of reactance: “Why are they trying so damn hard to convince me?”

There's also an important distinction between spending money to win an election and spending money to alter the conditions under which elections occur. The former is often surprisingly inefficient. The latter can be extraordinarily powerful.

A wealthy person funding a dozen eccentric scientific projects might produce one breakthrough and nine expensive failures. That's not necessarily a societal problem. A wealthy person acquiring a major news organization and gradually making it serve his political preferences is a different matter because the asset being accumulated isn't merely money; it's influence over the judgment of millions of other people.

Which brings us back to your original "balance." I wouldn't particularly mind a society containing a few enormously wealthy people if they remained legally constrained private actors. I'd worry much more about a society in which they could become owners of the machinery by which citizens decide what is true.