Opinion  ·  Policy & Power

Trading One Oligarchy for Another Is Not Progress

Sanders, AOC, Warren, and Mamdani promise to break the billionaire class. Their real proposal is to relocate its power — from people you can refuse to people you cannot.

~Michael T. Ruhlman

The loudest voices on the American left — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and now New York’s Zohran Mamdani — have built political careers on a single villain: the oligarch. The billionaire class, we are told, has captured our economy and corrupted our politics. Their solution? Transfer that concentrated power to the state.

Strip away the rhetoric, and the proposition is remarkably candid. Wealth taxes that force the liquidation of private enterprises. Government-run groceries. Public ownership of utilities and housing. Price controls set by political appointees. Nationalized sectors managed by federal agencies. Each proposal follows the same logic: power currently held by private actors should instead be held by government actors.

But here is the question the movement never answers: who, exactly, is the government?

The Bureaucrat Bears No Risk

It is not “the people” in any operational sense. It is a class of administrators, commissioners, agency heads, and political allies — appointed, largely unaccountable, and insulated from the consequences of their decisions in ways no private business owner ever is. A billionaire who misjudges the market loses his capital. A bureaucrat who misjudges the market writes a memo requesting a larger budget.

The private oligarch, whatever his flaws, faces constraints. He competes. He can be sued, boycotted, out-innovated, and bankrupted. Consumers can walk away from him tomorrow morning. The state oligarch faces none of this. He holds a monopoly enforced by law, funded by compulsory taxation, and defended by the machinery of government itself. When Warren proposes that federal regulators dictate the governance of every large American corporation, she is not dispersing power. She is relocating it — from people you can refuse to do business with to people you cannot.

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” Psalm 146:3 (KJV)

The Oligarchs Never Disappear — They Change Uniforms

History has run this experiment repeatedly, and the results are not ambiguous. Economies that concentrated commercial power in the state did not produce equality; they produced a nomenklatura — a political class with dachas, special stores, and privileges ordinary citizens could never touch. The oligarchs did not disappear. They simply changed uniforms.

Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores may sound modest by comparison, but the principle is identical: the answer to imperfect markets is political management of commerce. Yet the local bodega owner answers to his customers every single day. The municipal grocery authority answers to a committee, which answers to a process, which answers, eventually, to no one.

The Cure Is Competition, Not a New Aristocracy

None of this excuses genuine cronyism — the subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory favoritism that let politically connected firms rig the game. But cronyism is a disease of concentrated government power, not an argument for more of it. The cure for a corrupted market is competition and accountability, not a new aristocracy with better slogans.

Progress would mean dispersing power — breaking up cozy arrangements between big business and big government alike. What Sanders, AOC, Warren, and Mamdani offer instead is a change of management. The tower stays standing. Only the nameplate on the penthouse changes.