One of the things I love about California is that sometimes ordinary people get to go around the politicians.
That’s because, back in 1911, Californians created the initiative process as a direct response to the power of the Robber Barons. The Southern Pacific Railroad had so much control over the state legislature that many people believed democracy itself had been captured by corporate wealth. So they created a way for citizens to put measures directly on the ballot.
More than a century later, we’re facing another Gilded Age.
Today’s Robber Barons aren’t railroad tycoons. They’re billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their fortunes are larger than the budgets of many states. Their influence reaches into our elections, our media, our economy, and even the information we see every day.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously warned nearly a hundred years ago: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
He was right then. He’s even more right today.
That’s why I’m enthusiastically supporting the California Billionaire Tax Initiative.
This measure asks a simple question: should a tiny handful of people whose wealth gives them extraordinary power contribute a small portion of that wealth to strengthen the society that made their fortunes possible?
I believe the answer is an unequivocal yes.
The initiative would impose a one-time tax on the extraordinary wealth of California billionaires, generating tens of billions of dollars for public purposes, primarily healthcare. It doesn’t raise taxes on working families. It doesn’t affect small businesses. It doesn’t target millionaires. It applies only to a microscopic number of people whose wealth has reached levels that distort both our economy and our democracy.
Predictably, the billionaire class and their allies will tell us this is dangerous. They’ll warn that wealth will flee, innovation will disappear, and the sky will fall.
We’ve heard that song before.
They said workers couldn’t have weekends. They said Social Security would bankrupt America. They said Medicare would destroy healthcare. They said raising taxes on the wealthy would crush economic growth. Time and again, history has shown that when working people organize, democracy expands—and life gets better for millions.
As a socialist, I don’t believe billionaires are the problem because they’re bad people. I believe they’re the predictable outcome of an economic system that concentrates wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Capitalism rewards ownership far more than work. Eventually, that wealth becomes political power, allowing the richest among us to shape the rules in their own favor.
That’s why I often say: No one earns a billion dollars. Billionaires accumulate wealth because the rules are written in their favor.
Supporting this initiative doesn’t mean believing one ballot measure will transform society. It won’t.
But it is exactly the kind of non-reformist reform our movements should champion. It will improve people’s lives while demonstrating that concentrated wealth can be challenged democratically. It opens the door to bigger conversations about worker ownership, community land trusts, public banking, the solidarity economy, and an economy organized around meeting human needs instead of maximizing corporate profits.
Winning matters—not because it finishes the job, but because it helps us build the confidence and organization needed for the next fight.
Even if you don’t live in California, you should be paying attention.
If CA voters can use the initiative process—created in 1911 to challenge the Robber Barons of that era—to stand up to the billionaire class of our own time, it will send a powerful message across the country.
Organized people can still beat organized money. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
David Cobb is the host of the popular podcast Redneck Gone Green, dubbed a “people’s lawyer”, David has spent his career litigating corporate polluters and civil rights violators. He was the Green Party Presidential nominee In 2004, In 2010 he co-founded Move To Amend, In 2016 he served as the Campaign Manager for Jill Stein’s presidential campaign. Currently he serves as the Co-Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network and the People’s Network for Land Liberation, a consortium which seeks to de-commodify the land to reestablish a right relationship with the earth and all of our relatives and relations.
Steal Magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote a short tract called "The Gospel of Wealth" where he argued the wealth the wealthy obtained should be recycled into the society from whence it came, a policy he actually practiced although few of his fellow Plutocrats followed his lead. His argument is as valid today as ever. Obscene wealth is precisely that--obscene--and is clearly a moral failure of the society where it's allowed to arise.