Business Ought Never Be Politics

The country is for people.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

There is a word the American political conversation has been using for forty years that has been doing more damage than any other word in the lexicon, and the word is businessperson.

The word is doing damage because it is being used to describe two entirely different kinds of human beings as though they were the same kind of human being. The first kind is the woman who owns a thirty-person company. She has a payroll. She has customers. She has competitors. She wins or loses on whether the thing she makes is worth what she charges for it. She is inside a market, disciplined by a market, accountable to a market. Whatever else you think of her position, she is doing the thing that capitalism, in its honest defense of itself, claims to reward. She is producing goods or services that other people want enough to pay for, and she is doing so under conditions that allow other people to enter the same market and outcompete her if she stops doing it well.

The second kind is the man who owns enough of the platform on which political speech happens to determine which speech reaches the public. He is not inside a market in any sense his accountant would recognize. He is inside a position. He has spent twenty years accumulating the position. He has spent the last decade insulating the position from competition through regulatory capture, through preferential tax treatment, through the suppression of organized labor, through the purchase of the political class that would otherwise have constrained him. He does not win or lose on whether the thing he produces is worth what he charges for it. He wins by ensuring that no one is in a position to challenge what he charges, that no one is in a position to enter his market, that no one is in a position to tell the public the truth about how he operates, and that the politicians who might pass laws against him are funded out of his discretionary budget rather than the public’s.

These two human beings are not the same human being. The English language has a word for the first. The English language has had a word for the second since Aristotle. The word is oligarch. The word is plutocrat. The word is rentier. The word, in the American constitutional tradition from Jefferson forward, is aristocrat. The word is not businessperson.

Every time the American political conversation calls the second kind by the first kind’s name, the first kind’s legitimacy is being imported into the second kind’s defense. The corner-store owner’s apron is being lifted off her shoulders and draped over the oligarch’s suit. The decency that attends the woman who actually competes in a market is being borrowed, without her permission, by the man who has spent his fortune insulating himself from markets. This is the laundering operation. This is the forty-year project. The vocabulary fight is not a side issue. The vocabulary is the fight.

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The reason the vocabulary fight is the whole fight is that as long as the American conversation is conducted in the wrong vocabulary, the conversation cannot reach the question that actually matters, which is not the question the cable channels argue about.

The question the cable channels argue about is capitalism versus socialism. The question is whether markets or states should allocate resources. The question is whether the marginal tax rate should be higher or lower, whether the regulatory state should be larger or smaller, whether the public sector should provide more services or fewer. This is a real question and it has produced honest arguments on both sides for two centuries. It is not the question that is destroying the American republic. The American republic has survived periods of higher and lower taxation, larger and smaller regulatory states, more and fewer public services, all within the constitutional order. The constitutional order did not collapse over the marginal tax rate. The constitutional order will not be saved by getting the marginal tax rate right.

The question that is destroying the American republic is whether the men who have accumulated concentrated economic power are allowed to convert that economic power into political power. This question runs perpendicular to the capitalism-socialism axis. You can be a capitalist on the right side of this question — in fact, if you are an honest capitalist, you have to be, because oligarchy is what markets become when the political authority cannot constrain them, and oligarchy is the death of the very competition the capitalist claims to value. You can be a socialist on the wrong side of this question — there have been many, in the history of left politics, who supposed that concentrated economic power would be acceptable as long as it was concentrated in hands they trusted, and they have been wrong every time. The axis that matters is not the axis cable news argues about. The axis that matters is the axis between constitutionalism and oligarchy, between the position that political authority belongs to citizens equally and the position that political authority can be purchased by those who have accumulated the resources to purchase it.

The argument I am making in this piece is that this is the only axis that matters right now. The capitalism-versus-socialism argument is a distraction maintained at considerable expense by people whose interest is in keeping the real argument off the table. The real argument is older than capitalism and older than socialism. The real argument is as old as the polis. Aristotle named it. The framers of the American constitution named it. Every serious constitutional theorist in the western tradition has named it. The argument is whether the political authority can hold the prior claim over the economic actors, or whether the economic actors can purchase the political authority. There is no third position. There is no compromise. The wall holds or the wall does not hold. When the wall does not hold, the polity is no longer a republic. It may retain the forms of a republic for a generation or two — the elections, the courts, the legislative chambers, the constitutional text — but the substance is gone. The substance is gone because the men who own the resources have purchased the elections and captured the courts and rented the legislative chambers and instrumentalized the constitutional text for their own protection. The forms persist. The substance is oligarchy.

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The American constitutional tradition has always understood this. The capitalism-versus-socialism argument has obscured the tradition, but the tradition is there in the founding documents and the foundational arguments and the entire serious literature of American self-government from 1787 to the day before yesterday.

Adam Smith, whom every American conservative claims as a founding father of the position they hold, spent half of Wealth of Nations warning that merchants would always combine in conspiracy against the public if they were not prevented from doing so by political authority that was independent of them. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Smith was not naive about what unconstrained capital would do to a market. Smith knew that a market without political authority strong enough to police it would not remain a market for long. It would become a position, and the position would become a rent, and the rent would become an aristocracy. Smith’s argument against mercantilism was not an argument against the state. It was an argument against a state that had been captured by merchants. He wanted the state restored to the public, not abolished, because he understood that without a public state the merchants would simply be the state, and the freedom Smith cared about would be the first thing they liquidated.

Thomas Jefferson, in his correspondence with Madison and Adams over decades, was explicit about what would destroy the American experiment if it were not constantly fought against. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. The aristocracy of our monied corporations. The phrase is from 1816. The thing he was warning against was the thing that has now happened. The dare he predicted is the dare we have lost.

James Madison, in Federalist 10, gave the most analytically careful statement of the problem in the founding literature. The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man, and the most enduring source of faction is the various and unequal distribution of property. Madison did not write Federalist 10 to celebrate factions. He wrote it to explain how the structure of the constitution would attempt to prevent the most dangerous faction — the faction of concentrated economic interest — from capturing the federal government. The structure of the constitution is an answer to the question of how to keep concentrated capital from converting itself into political dominion. The answer Madison proposed — separation of powers, federalism, the extended republic, the multiplicity of competing interests — was the answer of someone who took the problem with full seriousness and who knew the answer would have to be defended in every generation if it was going to hold.

Theodore Roosevelt, in his Malefactors of Great Wealth speech in 1907, gave the canonical Progressive Era statement. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. TR was not a socialist. TR was a Republican president who had been a cowboy and a hunter and a colonel and a trust-buster. TR understood that the survival of the American constitutional order required the active maintenance of the boundary between concentrated capital and political authority, and that the maintenance required state power capable of breaking up the trusts when the trusts grew large enough to threaten self-government. The Republican party of 1907 understood this. The Republican party of 1907 is not the Republican party of 2026.

Louis Brandeis, in Other People’s Money and in his Supreme Court opinions and in his lifelong campaign against what he called the curse of bigness, made the operational case. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. The sentence is the cleanest statement in the American tradition of the doctrine I am defending in this piece. Brandeis did not say that we may have democracy or we may have markets. He did not say that we may have democracy or we may have capitalism. He said democracy is incompatible with concentrated wealth, and he said it because concentrated wealth will, by its nature and not by any individual malice, convert itself into political power until the political authority of the people has been displaced. Brandeis’s career was the operational answer to Madison’s analytical question. The answer was antitrust enforcement, securities regulation, banking regulation, labor law, the progressive income tax, the estate tax. The answer was the wall. The wall that Brandeis and the Progressives built and that the New Deal reinforced and that the Great Society completed was the wall that prevented the American republic from becoming what every prior commercial republic in human history had become, which was an oligarchy with constitutional forms.

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The wall was torn down. The tearing down took forty years and it was conducted by a political project whose participants understood at every step what they were doing and what the consequences would be.

The project’s intellectual origins are documentable. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman built the academic argument that the regulatory state was a slippery slope to totalitarianism. The argument was wrong on its premises and catastrophic in its application but it provided cover for what would otherwise have been a transparent class project. The Powell Memo of 1971, written by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, laid out the operational plan. American business needed to fund think tanks, capture law schools, train a generation of judges, build an alternative media ecosystem, and recapture the federal government from the New Deal coalition that had been running it for forty years. The plan was executed. The funding came from the same families and corporate interests that would benefit from the wall coming down. The Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network. The think tanks were built — Heritage, Cato, AEI, the Federalist Society. The law schools were captured, one chair at a time. The judges were trained. The media was built. The government was recaptured.

The legal demolition proceeded through a series of decisions whose names are now standard vocabulary among constitutional lawyers who understand what was done. Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 ruled that money is speech and that the wealthy may therefore spend without limit on their own political advocacy. The decision took down a major brick. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti in 1978 extended first-amendment protections to corporate political speech. Another brick. McConnell v. FEC, Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014, the Speechnow line. The bricks came down faster as the appointees from the captured judicial pipeline reached the federal bench. The Roberts Court, by 2014, had completed the legal demolition of American campaign finance law. There is now no effective limit on the amount of money the wealthy may spend to determine election outcomes in the United States. The wealthy spend the money. The election outcomes are determined. The republic notices that something has gone wrong but cannot quite name what.

The regulatory demolition proceeded in parallel. The Reagan administration began the systematic underfunding and capture of the regulatory agencies the New Deal had built. Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that had separated commercial and investment banking, was repealed in 1999 under Clinton. The repeal made possible the financial concentration that produced the 2008 crisis, which produced the bailouts, which produced the further concentration. Antitrust enforcement, which had been the spine of the wall since Sherman, was hollowed out by the Bork-influenced consumer-welfare standard that ruled that monopoly was acceptable as long as prices stayed low. Prices stayed low. The monopolies grew. The platforms acquired the share of public communication they now hold. The pharmaceutical industry consolidated. The airline industry consolidated. The publishing industry consolidated. The wall between concentrated capital and political authority dissolved because the concentrated capital had grown large enough to dissolve it.

Labor law was the other great wall. The Wagner Act of 1935 had established the legal right of workers to organize. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had begun the rollback. The Reagan administration’s destruction of PATCO in 1981 was the signal that the federal government would no longer enforce the labor protections it had nominally maintained. Right-to-work laws spread. Organizing rates collapsed. By 2025, private-sector union membership in the United States was below six percent. The countervailing power that organized labor had provided against organized capital in the mid-century settlement no longer existed. The wall had lost one of its largest reinforcing members.

By the time Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the petro-AI rentier coalition behind him, there was no wall. There was the constitutional text. There were the elections. There were the courts. But the substance of the wall — the financial regulations, the antitrust enforcement, the campaign finance limits, the labor protections, the press independence, the academic freedom that produced the analyses required to see what was happening — had been demolished, one brick at a time, over forty years, by a project that had announced its intentions in the Powell Memo and executed those intentions with the patience and discipline that only well-funded long campaigns can sustain. The petro-AI rentier coalition did not have to break down a wall. They walked through a space where a wall had once been.

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This is the position we are in. The first cabinet of the second Trump administration is a cap table. The largest single fortune in human history is being managed from inside a department of the federal government invented for the purpose. The platforms on which American political speech happens are owned by men who have explicitly aligned themselves with the political project that benefits them. The press that would have reported what they were doing has been bought, threatened, or marginalized to the point where its reporting cannot reach the audience that would act on it. The judiciary that would have constrained them has been packed, over forty years, with appointees from the Federalist Society pipeline whose entire career incentive structure runs through the same network that benefits from the absence of the wall. The Congress that might have passed laws against them is funded by them and dares not move. The presidency is theirs.

This is what the American political conversation should be about. It is not what the American political conversation is about. The American political conversation is about whether the marginal tax rate should be a few points higher or lower, whether the federal budget should be a few points larger or smaller, whether transgender athletes should compete in women’s sports, whether some immigrant deserves to be deported, whether some university should be punished for some speech act by some student. These are the arguments the petro-AI rentier coalition is content to let us have. These are the arguments the captured media will host. These are the arguments the captured political class will perform. The argument the coalition will not let us have, because it is the only argument that threatens them, is the argument about whether they should be allowed to occupy the position they have purchased.

The argument is the wall argument. The argument is whether business ought to be politics. The argument is whether the man who has accumulated three hundred billion dollars should be allowed to run a department of the federal government because he funded the campaign that elected the president. The argument is whether the platforms on which speech happens should be allowed to be owned by men whose political project depends on suppressing certain speech. The argument is whether the cabinet should be drawn from the donor class that funded the presidency that nominated the cabinet. The argument is whether the regulatory agencies should be staffed by the industries they are supposed to regulate. The argument is whether the courts should be filled with judges selected by a private organization funded by the parties that have business before the courts. The argument is whether the press should be owned by men whose interest is in not having the press do its work.

The argument is the only argument. Everything else is a distraction maintained by people whose interest is in the maintenance of the distraction.

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So state the doctrine plain. Business ought never be politics.

A business is a legitimate human activity. A business produces goods or services that other human beings want and trades them in markets that other businesses are free to enter. A business is disciplined by the willingness of customers to pay and by the willingness of competitors to undercut and by the law that requires it to deliver what it promised and pay its workers what it owed and treat its customers honestly and report its taxes truthfully. A business operating within these constraints is one of the most valuable forms of human cooperation we have ever invented. The corner-store owner is a business. The thirty-person company is a business. The family farm is a business. The neighborhood restaurant is a business. The independent press is a business. The local manufacturer is a business. The freelance designer is a business. These businesses are the productive substrate of any healthy economy and the cultural substrate of any healthy political community. They deserve the moral standing the culture extends to them. They earn the standing every day they operate, because every day they operate they are subject to the disciplines that make the standing meaningful.

A business becomes something else the moment its principals begin to use the resources of the business to purchase political outcomes. The transition is the corruption. The transition has a name. The American name for it, since Jefferson, has been aristocracy. The European name for it, since Aristotle, has been oligarchy. The Russian name for it, since the 1990s, has been oligarch unmodified, which is the name that has migrated into English because the thing it names has migrated into the American republic. The current American instance is the most fully developed oligarchy the republic has ever produced. It is more concentrated than the Gilded Age, by every measure economists use. It is more politically active than the Gilded Age. It is more ideologically self-conscious than the Gilded Age. The robber barons mostly wanted to be left alone to extract their rents. The current oligarchs want to be the state. Some of them, in their more candid moments at private conferences and in their books and in their philosophers’ lectures in Roman palazzi, have said so explicitly.

The doctrine is not difficult. The doctrine is not radical. The doctrine is the unbroken position of the entire serious American constitutional tradition from Madison through Brandeis. The doctrine is the operating assumption of every functioning constitutional democracy in the world. The doctrine is the precondition for self-government. The doctrine is what the American political project was originally for.

Business ought never be politics. The thirty-person company owner has every right to be involved in her community’s political life as a citizen, on equal terms with other citizens, with the influence available to one human being and the vote available to one voter. The owner of a controlling stake in the platform on which political speech happens does not have the right to use the platform to determine the outcome of the elections in which his interests are at stake. The first is a citizen exercising her citizenship. The second is an oligarch exercising his oligarchy. The line between them is the line the entire American constitutional order is supposed to defend, and the defense of that line is the only political project that matters in the current moment.

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The clearest current illustration of what the absence of the wall makes possible is the metering of intelligence.

Sam Altman said it on stage at the BlackRock US Infrastructure Summit in Washington on March 11 of this year, in front of an audience whose business is the allocation of the largest pool of private capital in human history. We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter. He said this as a pitch. He said it to the people whose money he was asking for. He said it because he understood that the audience would hear it not as a warning but as an opportunity, which is the correct reading of how the audience did in fact hear it.

Walk through what the sentence proposes. Intelligence is a utility. Intelligence is the capacity that our entire civilization has, since the species began, treated as the defining constitutive faculty of being human. The capacity has been delivered, throughout that history, by language and by writing and by the printing press and by the school and by the library and by the internet in its early form, and each of these delivery systems was, in its mature form, organized as a commons or as a public utility precisely because the species understood that the capacity to think together was the precondition for self-government. The proposal is to reorganize the delivery as a private rental. The proposal is to install a meter between human beings and the cognitive operations they have been performing for themselves for two hundred thousand years. The meter is owned. The owner sets the rate. The rate is collected on every operation that flows through the meter, every query, every paragraph drafted, every document summarized, every student’s homework, every doctor’s note, every brief, every memo, every email, every search. The meter compounds. The rent funds the next round of compute. The next round of compute deepens the moat. The moat ensures that no competitor can install a meter of comparable capacity. The owner’s meter becomes the meter. By the time the civilization notices what has happened, the meter is load-bearing. The workflow of every institution has been restructured around the meter. The children have been educated on the metered system. The businesses are being run on the metered system. The courts and the hospitals and the legislatures are being briefed on documents drafted on the metered system. The meter cannot be removed without bringing down everything that has been built on top of it. The owner of the meter owns the cognitive infrastructure of the civilization.

Altman also, in the same conversation, referenced the old nuclear-energy phrase too cheap to meter, offered as the long-term aspiration. The slippage between the two halves of the sentence is the rhetorical trick of the entire AI industry. The utopian aspiration — intelligence as cheap as the air, abundant for everyone — provides cover for the actual extraction, which is metered rent on a faculty the species used to consider constitutive of being human. The aspiration will never arrive because the aspiration is not what is being built. The meter is what is being built. The meter is what the BlackRock audience was being asked to fund. The aspiration is what the press release will say.

This is what the absence of the wall makes possible. Forty years ago there would have been antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department who would have read Altman’s sentence and opened a file the same week. There would have been senators who would have called hearings. There would have been a press that would have asked, plainly, on what authority a single private entity proposes to install itself as the metering apparatus on the cognitive infrastructure of the species, and what regulatory framework will govern the rate it charges, and what public interest standard will discipline its operations, and what democratic accountability will attach to its decisions about which queries it will and will not process. None of this is happening. The antitrust apparatus has been dismantled. The senators have been funded. The press is owned by men who have aligned themselves with the project. The regulatory framework is being written, where it is being written at all, by lobbyists employed by the entities the framework is supposed to constrain. The meter is being installed in real time, in front of us, with the full participation of the political and financial apparatus that the wall used to constrain, and there is no mechanism currently operative in American constitutional life that is capable of stopping it.

This is the doctrine made operational. This is what business becoming politics looks like at the moment of installation. The man who proposes to sell intelligence on a meter is not a businessperson. The thirty-person company owner who sells shoes is a businessperson. The man at the BlackRock summit is something else. The English language has had a word for what he is for two thousand five hundred years. The word is not the word the press uses for him. The press uses founder and CEO and visionary and entrepreneur. The word the situation requires is aristocrat, in the Jeffersonian sense, or oligarch, in the Aristotelian sense, or — for the specific kind of aristocrat who proposes to install a permanent toll on a public faculty — monopolist, in the sense the Sherman Act was passed to address before the Sherman Act was disassembled.

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The reconstruction of the wall will take a generation. The demolition took forty years and the reconstruction will take longer because the materials are harder to assemble than they were to disassemble. The financial regulations have to be rewritten in the face of an industry that owns the writing process. The antitrust enforcement has to be rebuilt in the face of a judiciary that has been trained to oppose it. The campaign finance limits have to be reimposed against a Supreme Court that has ruled them unconstitutional. The labor protections have to be restored against a political coalition that has spent forty years dismantling them. The press independence has to be re-funded in the face of platforms whose entire business model depends on its absence. The judicial pipeline has to be retrained in the face of a Federalist Society network that has had a forty-year head start.

None of this is impossible. All of it is the work. The work is what citizenship looks like when the constitutional order is in danger and the prior generation’s solutions have been dismantled by the prior generation’s failures of vigilance. The work falls to the people who hold the doctrine and who can articulate why the doctrine matters and who can organize the political coalitions required to begin the reconstruction. The work is bipartisan because the doctrine is bipartisan. The work is supra-partisan because the doctrine is constitutional. The work is unifying because the people who hold the doctrine are in both parties and in neither and across every demographic and economic position in American life, and the only reason they do not yet know they are a coalition is that the captured political conversation has not allowed them to find each other.

I am writing these pages partly to help them find each other. The middle road I have been describing across this week’s writing is the road of the people who hold the constitutional position against the oligarchic capture, against the postliberal project, against the petro-AI rentier coalition that has purchased the executive branch, against the conflations and the laundering operations and the vocabulary games that keep the real argument from happening. The road is the road of the substrate. The road is the road of the people who still believe that political authority belongs to citizens and not to dollar amounts. The road is the third American founding, when it comes, and the founding will come because the alternative is the end of the republic and the republic still has enough citizens in it who are not yet ready to let it end.

Business ought never be politics. That is the doctrine. That is the wall. That is the work.

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