Google cofounder Sergey Brin says he knows what socialism looks like. He was born in Moscow in 1973 and left the Soviet Union with his family at the age of six, an experience he recently invoked to attack California’s proposed tax on billionaires. “I fled socialism with my family in 1979,” he said, warning that he did not want California to “end up in the same place.” He has spent at least $57 million fighting the tax.But Brin is looking at the wrong Russia.The danger facing the United States is not that California will become the Soviet Union because one of the richest men on earth is asked to pay more tax. The danger is that America is drifting toward something far more familiar from Russia’s recent history: an authoritarian oligarchy in which vast private fortunes coexist with weakened democratic institutions and a corrupt political leader who rewards wealthy loyalists and punishes dissenters.There are several other telling flaws in his logic. Brin casts himself as defending freedom from the overreach of the state. But a tax proposal debated and voted on by citizens is not authoritarianism. It is democracy. Brin is free to argue against it, criticize its design, or warn about its unintended consequences. But when one of the richest people on earth spends tens of millions to stop voters from imposing even modest obligations on extreme wealth, the real threat to freedom begins to look rather different. It is not “socialism,” as he claims, but an example of how in America today, wealth can bend democratic decision-making before the public has even spoken.Public Assistance for Masters of the UniverseBrin’s complaint also rests on a commonplace myth about Silicon Valley: great fortunes are the natural reward for individual brilliance. This is the self-congratulatory story told by many of the Valley’s loudest libertarians, such as Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.Google’s own history tells the real story. The company did not emerge…
