California: billionaires are paying handsomely not to pay the Zucman tax

According to Libération, the French daily, Californians will vote on 3 November, alongside the US midterms, on Proposition 40: a one-off 5% tax on the wealth of the state's billionaires. The paper also reports that those affected do not intend to take it lying down. Between economist Gabriel Zucman, after whom the tax is named (it was first proposed by him as a levy on the very rich), and tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page, Libération describes a war of influence in which the latter reach for the chequebook. The details of the sums committed and the funding channels are not in the dispatch we have; we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First observation: the vote is a referendum. One voter, one vote, in principle. Yet the camp that owns most of the assets in question is also the one that can buy the most advertising space, consultants and "spontaneous op-eds". The billionaires are not challenging the rules of democratic play; they are entering it with the one resource they have in abundance. This is less an anomaly than a feature: capital does not need to run the state, it only needs to be able to buy the debate about the state.

Second observation, more arithmetical. A tax of 5%, paid once, on fortunes measured in billions. For wealth made up mostly of shares, that is a modest levy next to what those holdings may have gained in a few quarters. That so much campaign money is being spent to resist it says how much the principle matters more than the amount: if accumulated wealth can be dented once, it can be dented twice. Defending yourself dearly is a way of protecting a precedent.

Third point: where does this wealth come from? From our perspective, from collective labour, part of which is never paid: surplus value. Tech workers earn enough to reproduce their capacity to work; the rest, converted into stock-market capitalisation, adds up into personal fortunes. On this reading, a tax on that wealth amounts to handing a fraction of it back to the community that made it possible. It is understandable that owners see confiscation in it, and others see a correction.

Finally, the vocabulary. We will no doubt hear that the tax will "drive away" talent, that "the market will punish" it. The market does not flee: people decide to move, or threaten to. This disguising of private decisions as natural forces is a classic case of commodity fetishism, and it saves the complainants a precious amount of time.

We do not yet know the outcome of the vote, and what Libération reports of each protagonist's exact position deserves to be read in full. But the question is already posed: what does the right not to be taxed cost in 2026? The Californian billionaires seem to know the price well.