A billionaire's real power is not money but the absence of anyone who can stop him: fines he can pay forever and a government he can buy turn one man's whim into several million people's reality.
For three years someone in Chicago's Lincoln Park has been paying people to scatter nuts on the ground, drawing flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Bird droppings cover everything. Residents complain, fines pile up, and the nuts keep coming.
That someone is Barre Seid, 94, who made his fortune in electronics. Fines are pocket change to him, which is exactly why the city has no leverage.
First, what 'unthwarted' means
The writer, the tech critic Cory Doctorow, argues that the mark of a billionaire is not wealth but the fact that nobody can stand in his way.
In theory they face no election and answer to no one, yet they can change how millions of people live. Fellow workers cannot stop them, neighbours cannot stop them, the law cannot stop them.
Doctorow's comparison: they are like two-year-olds who believe only what they want counts. The difference is that ordinary toddlers get taught to grow out of it, while billionaires have the resources to make the rest of us agree.
The theory that backs it up
Economics has an idea called 'revealed preferences': ignore what a person says, watch only what he does.
By that logic, Doctorow notes, someone who sells a kidney to make rent has 'revealed a preference' for having one kidney. It is the schoolyard bully who grabs your arm and hits you with it while shouting 'stop hitting yourself.'
Under this theory, whatever a billionaire does is 'freedom,' and everyone else's freedom is whatever is left over.
Everyone else pays
Henry Ford was rich enough to think he could ignore the Earth's axial tilt, building worker housing in Brazil facing the same way as his housing in Michigan. Elon Musk behaves as if geometry and physics did not apply.
Seid does not believe in climate change and gave $1.6 billion to fund campaigns against climate action. Doctorow counts him among those to blame for the sea-level rise now underway.
What they share is this: no matter how foolish the idea, nobody can stop them. Which is why Doctorow says the existence of billionaires is itself a policy failure.
Why it matters
When a fine only deters the poor, the law stops being a rule and becomes a menu with prices. To judge how free a society is, do not count its statutes; ask whether it can make the richest man stop.
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