Rumors are rife that Gotham’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is preparing to spend a billion dollars of his own money to move from his town house on the Upper East Side to the White House.

Today, the mayor is scheduled to attend a Unity08 Forum in Oklahoma convened to explore alternatives to the two major parties.

In a recent radio interview Bloomberg sounded like a man eager to be this year’s dark horse. “They’re unwilling to face the big issues, and take the risks and give it straight to the public,” Bloomberg said of the Democratic and Republican contenders for the presidency. “And that’s not good for democracy, and it’s certainly not good for America.”

Face the big issues? Take the risks? Give it straight? Mayor Bloomberg must sense that Election 2008 needs a little comic relief.

No third-party movement has captured the White House since Abraham Lincoln led the Republicans to victory in 1860 opposing slavery in the territories.

Now, here comes Mayor Bloomberg, proposing to get there (if his New York City record offers any insight into his plans) by banning trans-fats from the nation’s ice-cream sundaes.

The mayor’s other signature initiative involved the creation of a centralized school bureaucracy under former Clinton-administration apparatchik Joel Klein.

It’ll certainly be fun for the Madison Avenue boys who write the voiceovers for the ad campaign. “As New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg cut the number of soufflés consumed in French restaurants by 30%. There were groans in the kitchens of Bouley and Le Cirque. But Mike Bloomberg stayed the course . . .”

The mayor’s prospective candidacy exposes the sorry state of our plutocracy. Bloomberg, a wildly successful capitalist, is at the same time a fairly orthodox tax-and-spend liberal. Under his administration, New York City’s budget has mushroomed to $54 billion. Instead of cutting taxes, the mayor wants to keep the city’s sales tax — slated to go down to 7.375 percent in July — at 8.375 percent. If he succeeds, more than a billion dollars that might have remained in New Yorkers’ pockets each year will go to the government.

What is wrong with our masters of the universe, our kings of the entrepreneurial jungle, our Social-Darwinian Super-Men? Why is it that these keen-eyed operators, as soon as they lift their eyes from the work that made them rich, cravenly surrender to the politics of Ralph Nader?

Bloomberg is not the only nob who is nagging us to build up the nanny state.

Warren Buffett, caught up in the kind of mass idiocy he disdained when he was picking stocks, hails the freshly anointed champion of the Left, Barack Obama, as the Moses who will “lead us to the right place.”

The Gates dynasty rallies to save exorbitant death taxes.

George Soros is, well, George Soros.

They are the Philippe d’Égalités of capitalism — selling short the core principles of the creed that made them great.

Oh, for an hour of Rockefeller! “God gave me my money,” John D. said. Not for him the syrupy penance that leads today’s plutocrats to assuage their guilt and indulge their vanity by posing as Tribunes of the Plebs. (John D. left that to grandson Nelson A.)

It’s not just what the billionaires do. It’s what they fail to do. The role of the man who has outstripped the crowd is to “take possession of the beautiful,” not to bother himself with petty wonkery that any garden-variety actuary or mob-baiting trial-lawyer is competent to address.

The learned Werner Jaeger, having spent a lifetime soaking in the Greek texts, was rabidly adamant on this point. “The nobility,” he said in his book Paideia,

is the prime mover in forming a nation’s culture. The history of Greek culture—that universally important aspect of the formation of the Greek national character—actually begins with the aristocratic world of early Greece, with the creation of a definite ideal of human perfection, and ideal towards which the élite of the race was constantly trained. . . . All later culture, however high an intellectual level it may reach, and however greatly its content may change, still bears the imprint of its aristocratic origin.

The billionaires who give us welfare-state cant could give us culture. We need civilization more than we need soufflé regulation. In the last century modernist poets and painters reduced the temples of the Muses to rubble. Literature was siphoned off into a petroleum reserve to be burnt by the diligent pedants of the M.L.A. Pennsylvania Station was torn down that some travesty of Gropius could rise.

Our plutocrats could be latter-day Medicis, patrons of the arts devoted to restoring a culture that under Paris Hilton and the sisters Spears is rapidly becoming a joke. But no, Trimalchio must go and save the world with a flabby charity and a gelatinous altruism.

Is it fear — an apprehension that the sans-culottes will recover their nerve and hang the tycoon from the wifi receiver of the nearest internet café — that has turned our plutocrats into blubbering sentimentalists, whining about the insufficiency of death taxes?

Or does the warmed-over Emma Goldmanism reflect rather the inability of the mind to transcend its habitual constraints? The plutocrat, whatever might have been his earliest inspiration, inevitably becomes, in the pursuit of gain, the most thoroughgoing of materialists. An imaginative billionaire is almost a contradiction in terms. It is all but impossible, once he has clawed his way to a fortune, for the Silicon-Valley big-shot or Fifth-Avenue shogun to forsake the spirit of his ledgers, the narrow alchemy of profit and loss that raised him high; he continues to view the world through the prism of a hog-sow utilitarianism even when his position allows him to take a more artistic view.

Thus the spectacle of today’s plutocrats. They worry about the diets of the masses when they have the means to elevate their souls. They buy the work of dead artists but do not patronize living ones. Unlike Maecenas, they sponsor no experiments in beauty. They flunk even the most elemental of optimatorial tests: they fail to build magnificent houses. The Palladian splendor of the palaces reared by eighteenth-century English brewers and stockjobbers puts to shame the mansions of our modern Crassuses.

Do not look to the muezzins of oligarchy — Waugh, Lampedusa, Joseph Roth — to help us here. They were concerned to lament the passing of aristocratic orders. As a consequence their lamentations shed no light on the question of how a class of creative rich people is to be formed and testosteronized to do the work of culture.

But in a Bloomberg candidacy there is hope. The mayor, if he runs, may well become a laughingstock. The example of his rebuked hubris may give his fellow billionaires pause, and persuade them to put their fortunes to a more interesting use.

— Michael Knox Beran is author of Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.