The Hottest Midterm Race Is Milton Friedman Versus Marc Benioff: New at Reason

Of all the high-profile political contests on the ballot this week—Ted Cruz versus Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams versus Brian Kemp in Georgia, Dean Heller versus Jacky Rosen in Nevada—the one that may be the most consequential, long-term, is Marc Benioff versus Milton Friedman.

Benioff is the new owner of Time magazine and is the founder and chairman of Salesforce, a software company based in San Francisco. Bloomberg estimates his wealth at about $6 billion. Friedman is the Nobel Prize winning economist who spent a career teaching at the University of Chicago and then joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He died in 2006 in San Francisco.

Neither Benioff’s name nor Friedman’s is on the ballot. What is on the ballot, though, at least in the City of San Francisco, is Proposition C, which would raise business taxes there by an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year for the purpose of providing housing and services to homeless people. And that question, writes Ira Stoll, pits against each other two ideological perspectives on the role of businesses in public life.

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