Both Teddy Roosevelt and union leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Samuel Gompers decried the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Roosevelt’s presidential opponent, William Howard Taft, criticized legislation that would have enabled the foundation as “a bill to incorporate Mr. Rockefeller.”

Our era has not seen similar skepticism, despite the wealth inequality that serves as the precondition for such massive foundations. Though perhaps it is returning. In addition to Reich’s book, Anand Giridharadas will publish an adjacent argument in August about the new philanthropy, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Joanne Barkan has published in Dissent, The Guardian, and other publications about big philanthropy’s foibles, too.

Reich’s work, however, is compact, and comes direct from the heart of the new wealth in Silicon Valley. He can tick off the problems with each structural component of foundations.

First, big foundations are unaccountable. They answer neither to voters or to marketplace competition.

Second, they do not have to be transparent. They file one tax form. The $8 billion Simons Foundation International doesn’t even have a website.

Third, they are donor-directed. The employees—the people on the ground— “can’t determine the mission” of the organization.

Fourth, the donor’s intent must be respected even when the donor has died. Societies grow and change, but the mission defined by the creator of the foundation remains the mission in perpetuity.

And fifth, on top of all this, foundations are tax-subsidized. “We’re at a moment in American society in which the winners in the marketplace attempt to diminish their tax burdens, both corporately and individually, as low as they can legally go,” Reich told me. “Then having diminished their tax burden as low as it can go, they turn around and set up a private foundation, taking a further tax break.”

Then, with money that would have otherwise have gone to the government, where at least there is nominal democratic control over spending priorities, the philanthropists use that money on whatever social purpose they’ve decided to support.

Is this system, as Reich describes it, really one that any democracy would want?

“Instead of extending our enormous gratitude to the greatest philanthropists among us as these icons of civic beneficence, we should be scrutinizing and criticizing them,” Reich said. “Not because philanthropy is necessarily bad, but because it is an exercise of power.”

Reich does have some hope for the foundations—a suggestion for how they could do their work in ways that benefit democracies like ours. “Foundations,” he said, “should be making long-time-horizon, risky experiments in social innovation that the government won’t do and the marketplace is unlikely to do.”