Chrystia Freeland appeared on the Colbert Report last week and introduced a concept with which I was not previously familiar, the “self-tax.” Evidently some wealthy individuals have developed a new argument that goes like this: they should not pay more taxes because they already donate a lot of money to good causes, and they are more efficient than the government at determining which organizations would use their money wisely for the public good. So, the money that they spend on others should be considered the equivalent of a tax that they impose on themselves. Essentially the rest of us should defer to their judgment and, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, they will drag us kicking and screaming into a new Renaissance. This argument was actually presaged by the “thousand points of light” that the first President Bush liked to emphasize. Most people, however, did not understand that he was talking about rich people making charitable contributions. Maybe they thought that he was talking about Thomas Kinkade’s paintings.

Since it is well known that the super-rich have been amassing wealth at a remarkable rate for the last three decades, some might have wondered why there are any problems left to solve. One might expect that so much self-taxation would have made life for the rest of us a bed of roses by now.

My thoughts went in a different direction. The problem is the deficit, and the biggest item in the budget, after health care and Social Security, is the military. Why not eliminate military spending entirely and leave the defense of the country up to the self-taxers? Who could deny that they would do a better job of it than the politicians and the generals? How would a hedge fund manager react if nineteen Saudis and Egyptians hijacked three of our planes and flew them into buildings? I have never met a hedge fund manager, so I don’t know. Nevertheless, I sincerely doubt that he would consider authorizing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. If the rich people did decide to react militarily, do you think that they would think in terms of bombers supporting the marines? If there is a mosquito in the room, do you get your shotgun out of the closet? No, you reach for the Deet.

Turning defense over to the plutocrats would probably have worked well enough in keeping us out of Korea, Vietnam, and these messes that we are still in. The acute observer, however, might have a longer memory. What about the “good war?” Would our rich guys (and gals?) have been able to respond to an attack on Pearl Harbor and rally the country against Tojo and Hitler as well as FDR did?

Astute that observer may be, but not as perspicacious as he thinks. There would have never been an attack on Pearl Harbor! The Japanese fleet attacked Pearl Harbor because we parked our battleships there. With the plutocrats in charge we would not have had any battleships! No single billionaire would have had an incentive to build a battleship. Battleships cost a fortune, and they produce no revenue whatever. It is not much fun to ride around in a battleship anyway. Plutocrats prefer yachts. No battleships means no attack, and that means that we never would have had to go to war.

Governments are inherently inefficient, remember? Eventually the Japanese and German juggernauts would simply have collapsed under the weight of their own bloated bureaucracies. The four and a half years of bloody combat was really a tragic waste of time and human lives. The invisible hand of the market would have tipped the scales in favor of our efficient capitalist system.

You don’t buy that? OK, let’s assume that even the plutocrats need some kind of government to provide defense. The question then becomes one of making sure that the government is run efficiently, sticks to defense, and does not obstruct the market forces that make our country great. Democracy is clearly not the answer. The vast majority of people do not have sufficient appreciation of the way that the American wealth-creation machine works. The fact that after a lifetime of trying they are still not rich provides irrefutable proof of that basic tenet.

The obvious solution would be to weigh each person’s vote on the basis of wealth. Let’s say that each citizen was granted one vote for each $1,000,000 of net worth. Billionaires would then be allotted thousands of votes, and the unwashed masses would get a fraction each. Nobody would be disenfranchised; even those with negative net worth would be allowed .00001 votes. Since over half of the wealth in the country is owned by a few percent of the people, this could theoretically work. Unfortunately, the plan contains one fatal flaw: It requires that everyone be audited. Presumably the results would be made public, and the plutocrats would never stand for it.

So, a more subtle approach is required. I humbly submit the following suggestion. Let all people have unfettered access to the media, and let everyone say anything they want as long as they pay for it. Each rich person could then set aside a few million dollars in the petty cash drawer and either finance his or her own campaigns for office or find someone likeable who would reliably do what he was told. Then use the funds to buy ads to deluge the unsuspecting public with claims that the hapless opponent had done something opprobrious. Just pound the message home on every channel and every network and eventually it will get through the thickest of skulls. To assure that the message gets through, the media should be deregulated so that the market forces can direct their ownership to those most worthy of them, and we know who that is.

One final thing. Someone else’s fingerprints should be on this whole plan. We don’t want any conspiracy nuts suspecting a well-planned takeover. The best approach would be for it to come straight from the constitution, but it is probably not practicable to rewrite that document the way that Napoleon Pig did. On the other hand, the Supreme Court could claim that the idea was already in the constitution. Isn’t this perfect? All that we need to do is convince the right five people to go along with it. America, already such a great country, will then get the kind of government that it deserves.