No kings means no billionaires.
If someone grabs you by the pussy, you can punch them, bite them, run away.
If you are trapped in the same room as them, you must prevent them from being able to attack you again.
But what if they have accomplices – too many to count – how will you defend yourself?
You may be thinking of armed goons killing and kidnapping, in defiance of judges and the law. But these armed men are but the limbs.
To guide limbs you need eyes and ears, a central nervous system, a fuel system.
Who are those members of our society that have such power: the billionaires.
A new kind of royalty whose primary allegiance is to the king and their shareholders.
Nobility who are not subject to the laws that bind a free society.
What harm could they do, these genteel men?
Now, imagine that these nobles have special access to your WhatsApp chats, your Gmail, your Facebook Marketplace purchases, your Amazon wishlist, your Google Search history, your chats with AI assistants.
How would you escape that predator?
The alarm is being sounded by everyone from labor secretaries to the world’s biggest capitalists.
"I don't think we can have people as rich as Elon Musk and Larry Ellison and still sustain a democratic system." – Paul Krugman
"We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don't own apps… [a] small population of monsters who bestride and dominate the country and the planet and can only be constrained by the most concerted acts of public will." – Josh Marshall
"As Peter Thiel once admitted: 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.' Make no mistake: The goal of American oligarchy is to tear down democracy itself." – Robert Reich
"It's class warfare. My class is winning, but they shouldn't be." – Warren Buffett
You, a reasonable person, might think:
“If this catastrophe were really happening, I’d know about it.”
How?
From reading a newspaper owned by a billionaire?1
What is to be done?
It has been an article of faith that billionaires are normal and good; a sign that the free market is working and that we live in a free society.
Faith is a belief that is not grounded in reason or evidence.
Every independent who voted for MAGA understands implicitly if not explicitly that the average American is less free today than they were 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago.
Why? Because they have less economic power. Full stop.
What does MAGA say in response to this perceived lack of economic freedom?
They tell the American people: drive out the brown man and live in his home. Drive out the brown woman and jump to the head of the line in the ER.
These are all lies, of course, (blood libel, perhaps) but they are lies about a real problem.
What does the head of the Democratic party say about Americans’ lack of economic freedom?
"There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we're not taking money from those bad billionaires."
Ken Martin, ladies and gentlemen.
To be clear: there are no good kings in a free society. No good barons. No good lords.
We are either all free or we are none free.
Power is exercised.
Money bought the SCOTUS. Money bought the White House. Money is buying legislatures and courts around the country. And what people with more money want is more power at your expense.
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain.” – Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock
Who is this radical leftist Fink, telling us that our society is on the precipice of collapse because of the power of oligarchs?
He is the steward of the world’s largest asset manager, with approximately $14 trillion in assets.
A cabal of people who can “do anything” up to and very much including “grab them by the pussy” are anathema to a free society. (And, of course, a free market.)
The only way forward is to reject kings, continuously, and that very much includes billionaires.
p.s.
I originally intended to send this out last Sunday but deferred in honor of Bad Bunny day.
Today, however, I read this:
It’s a world of private, one-off deals, mutual pledges of secrecy, often enforced by soft, mutual extortion, and above all, a rejection of democratic accountability. We saw this coming into view during the late Biden administration, when Biden was already rapidly losing public support, with Elon Musk’s increasingly brazen efforts to run U.S. foreign policy from Twitter and SpaceX. The Saudis meanwhile were trying to ease Biden out of office through the manipulation of oil prices. It was no accident that Musk was advancing a strongly pro-Russian line in Ukraine, where he was most visibly trying to undermine U.S. policy.
…This wasn’t always the case. There didn’t use to be so many U.S. billionaires. And they characteristically had economic views which aimed to preserve their wealth. But they were not clearly on the right in the way they are now. They have moved an increasingly anti-civic democratic direction as the scale of their wealth and their identity as a class has exploded. They also weren’t so increasingly allied with primitive economy petro-states of the Gulf.
And watched this casual, methodical expose on our corrupted economy:
And, well, our kids are growing up into a 19th century dystopia.
BONUS
The fact that I don’t have to specify which newspaper or media outlet I’m talking about proves my point. ↩