Money is power. It always has been, and it always will be. Sure, votes are powerful, but voters can be influenced by money, so it's prohibitively difficult to g

Money is power. It always has been, and it always will be. Sure, votes are powerful, but voters can be influenced by money, so it's prohibitively difficult to get elected without the approval of capital. As a result, capital can band together as a class and purchase politicians to enact policies that are against the interests of people who have to produce for a living. Our political system is not democracy. Our political system is capitalism. It is occasionally tempered by the possibility of a popular uprising, so you can find democratic aspects if you look hard enough. How, then, do we prevent capital from ruling over labor? We must understand how exactly money works in making capital our kings. Money gives you the ability to compel almost anyone to produce for you. Producers agree because the money you pay them can be used to compel almost anyone to produce for them. In these terms, our goal is to eliminate the ability for capital to use money to compel individual producers to act against the interests of producers as a class. When capital attempts this, we want producers to refuse not out of principle, but because the incentive has been eliminated. If producers can't compel anyone to produce for them if their money has come from capital's attempt to rule as tyrants, then capital loses its ability to rule as tyrants. If this is the solution, then the problem is that money is anonymous. When someone compels me to produce for them, I have no idea where the money came from. If I did, I could refuse the tyrannical money while accepting any other money they attempt to pay with. Our money needs an auditable record of how it has flowed through the economy to allow people to exercise their inalienable right to reject the tyranny of capital. This requires sacrificing financial privacy, which sounds bad, but it's worth considering whether this 700 year-old concept should be as sacred as it seems. How do you build an auditable record of how money has flowed through an economy? Blockchains give us such records without needing to bestow power to any central authority to maintain the record. Blockchains will let us build a political system where capital still directs production, but the producing class has veto power. Capital alone isn't enough to rule; merit is also required. This is merit capitalism, and I think it could work better than not just the charade of democracy we have today, but also the ideal democracy that we thought we wanted.