So I wrote this for another reason but it is pretty appropriate here::

Take a billionaire. Any one.
At some point they inevitably will have made a public proncement something like "Why do we bother with these useless politicians ? I am a self made man. I can make much better investment decisions than those guys. Let me keep all my money and I will keep making better investment decisions."

Guess what - Maybe. Err, Mostly No.

Look firstly you are not a self-made man. You are an investment from your society that built a school, paid the teachers, injected you with vaccines and fed your growing body and mind and after twenty years of that sent you and millions like you out to make money and give some of it back in tax to pay for the repairs to the roads and schools and hospitals.

And even after that you did not do all the work at your compmay yourself - you hired people (at a presumably fair wage) and arranged things so that more of the profits flowed to you than to them. This was all legal. (I hope!)

But most especially you were not the only visionary in the desert. Every startup that succeeds has competitors - there is even a Sillicon Valley saying "competition is Gods way of saying there is money to be made". You gave a great pitch - but it fell on fertile ground. Investors realised this was a good opportunity and pushed cash into your hands, engineers and sales people realised this was the industry they wanted and shoved CVs into your hands.

You did a great job as an Enteprenuer - well done. But you were not the only one, you are not an island and you are fortunate to have benefitted from a specific corporate structure. Imagine how rich you would be if you had started a co-operative owned solely by employees or like a Vanguard investment fund owned by shareholders (unlike most hedge funds). you would still be rich - just normal rich.

Of course my dear self made billionaire, you probably are a better invester than our politicians, smarter too. But that is not the point. We are asking them to make investments that dwarf even your funds - the President of the USA hands out a 6Trillion dollar budget and that's just the federal bit. And we want a bit more ... accountability and a bit more responsiveness from the guy investing so much of our hard earned.

If you want to invest that (and let's agree you will probably do a better job) you need to persuade us (ie your new investors) that you are the right person to spend it. So is your name on the ballot? No? ok so you are not, in our terms, handing out a prospectus. in tat case you don't get to invest on our behalf. how it works is that people who invest our tax money get elected. That way we can remove them when we don't like it. (it's not a great system i have to admit but no better alternatives seem to exist)

So give us back (most?) of then money you made. we will use it to build schools for the next entrepreneurs, and also lots of other stuff we will all massively argue about.

In short, you are an investment in our massive VC fund, and you have paid off handsomely. Now we want our exit please. Death and taxes are the only two promises we ever make.

Having said that we would be very interested in your manifesto (sorry prospectus). Can you do anything about the potholes round my way?