A few years ago, everything had to have synergy.
You couldn’t just have two departments work together. They had to create synergy.
Then everything became disruptive. You couldn’t just make a better product. You had to disrupt an industry.
Then came thought leadership, purpose-driven, agile, holistic, ecosystems, transformational leadership, social impact and whatever other collection of words the keynote-speaker class could cram onto a PowerPoint slide.
Most business buzzwords eventually die merciful deaths.
One, unfortunately, seems determined to stick around.
Stakeholder.
Stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder responsibility. Stakeholder value. Stakeholder capitalism.
I can’t escape it.
And unlike synergy, which was mostly annoying, I think this one actually matters.
Read more: Stakeholder Capitalism: The Trojan Horse Nobody Voted ForBecause behind a perfectly reasonable-sounding business philosophy is a much larger question:
Who gets to exercise power over whom?
That question is really what this essay is about.
Stakeholder capitalism is not responsible for every problem I am going to discuss. It didn’t create corporate consolidation. It didn’t invent lobbying, campaign finance, regulatory capture or government pressure on private institutions.
What it does provide is something important:
a moral justification for powerful private institutions to move beyond doing business and begin intentionally directing society.
Combine that expanded discretion with enormous concentrations of corporate power and close relationships between corporations and government, and I think we have a serious problem.
As a Christian, the underlying premise doesn’t surprise me very much.
I have a fairly low opinion of mankind’s ability to handle unchecked power.
That includes people whose politics I share.
That includes people whose theology I share.
That includes me.
The problem isn’t merely that the wrong people acquire power.
The problem is that people acquire power.
That is why power needs limits.
Stakeholders Sound Nice
Stakeholder capitalism sounds almost impossible to oppose.
The idea is that corporations shouldn’t worry only about shareholders. They should also consider employees, customers, suppliers, communities, the environment and society more broadly.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has promoted versions of the stakeholder model since 1971. The World Economic Forum describes stakeholder capitalism as a system in which companies seek long-term value while considering the interests of their stakeholders and society as a whole.
In 2019, the Business Roundtable—representing CEOs of many of America’s largest corporations—formalized essentially the same idea in its Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. Initially signed by 181 CEOs, it committed those companies to customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders rather than shareholder interests alone.
Sounds good.
And parts of it are.
I run a manufacturing company. Employees matter to me. Customers matter. Suppliers matter. Our community matters. Long-term stewardship matters.
A company that poisons everything around it, treats employees like garbage and screws its customers probably isn’t going to remain a very good company for long anyway.
So stakeholder capitalism begins with a perfectly reasonable observation:
Corporations affect people besides shareholders.
Fine.
The problem comes when we move from:
Corporations should behave responsibly
to:
Corporations should decide what their responsibilities to society are.
Those are not the same thing.
The second one is political.
The Real Problem Is Discretion
A shareholder can vote his shares or sell them.
A customer can stop buying something.
An employee can leave.
A citizen can vote.
But who speaks for “the community”?
Who represents future generations?
Who decides what the environment requires?
Who determines whether a company is producing the correct “societal impact”?
Somebody has to.
And the more constituencies corporate management supposedly represents, the more discretion management acquires to decide which interests matter, how much they matter and what should be done about them.
A manager answerable primarily to shareholders at least has a reasonably identifiable constituency and objective, however imperfect either may be.
A manager answerable to shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, future generations, the environment and society can justify almost any decision by claiming to balance competing stakeholder interests.
A manager answerable to everyone can quickly become accountable to no one.
This criticism isn’t mine alone. Harvard Law scholars Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita argued in The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance that stakeholder governance can increase managerial discretion without giving the supposed beneficiaries meaningful power over management.
Their subsequent research found that the overwhelming majority of CEOs signing the Business Roundtable statement apparently did not even obtain board approval before doing so. (Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance)
That’s rather revealing.
Stakeholder capitalism does not create concentrated corporate power.
We already have that.
It supplies concentrated corporate power with a broader mandate.
That is the part that worries me.
And We’re Teaching It
This isn’t just something Klaus Schwab talks about in Switzerland.
AACSB, one of the world’s major business-school accrediting organizations, incorporated “societal impact” into its 2020 accreditation standards and has since described the change as a fundamental shift in how business schools define their purpose and success.
The United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Management Education similarly promotes sustainability, responsibility and ethics across hundreds of participating institutions.
That doesn’t mean every professor is indoctrinating students into some unified stakeholder ideology.
Of course not.
It simply demonstrates that the proposition that businesses should intentionally pursue broad social outcomes has moved well beyond Davos and into mainstream management institutions.
Interestingly, some of the terminology has already begun retreating.
ESG isn’t the unstoppable corporate juggernaut it appeared to be a few years ago. JPMorgan Asset Management, State Street and PIMCO left Climate Action 100+ in 2024, while BlackRock substantially reduced its participation.
BlackRock’s explanation is especially useful. When Climate Action 100+ moved into a more demanding second phase, BlackRock said applying those commitments across its assets under management “would raise legal considerations, particularly in the U.S.”.
In other words, a powerful institution encountered countervailing pressure and changed its behavior.
Good.
That is what checks on power are supposed to do.
But there is an important distinction.
I want ESG to lose on the merits—in markets, in fiduciary law, in shareholder votes and through public legislation where appropriate.
I don’t want it strangled through some regulator quietly telling a bank or investment manager behind closed doors that continued participation may create “concerns.”
Why?
Because the same tool will eventually be pointed back at me.
The issue isn’t whether government may ever challenge powerful corporations.
Of course it may.
The issue is how.
Public, lawful and contestable government action is part of constitutional government. A statute can be challenged. A subpoena is public. Litigation creates a record. A state government deciding how it invests its own pension assets can be debated and voters can remove the officials responsible.
A regulator quietly implying consequences during a private supervisory conversation is something different.
The affected citizen may never know the conversation happened.
That distinction becomes important later.
The Best Argument Against Me
There is an obvious response to everything I’ve written so far.
Government is slow.
Government is frequently incompetent.
Government itself is heavily influenced by special interests.
Legislation takes years while genuine problems may require immediate action.
Pollution doesn’t wait for Congress.
Neither does technological change.
Neither does a public-health emergency.
So if corporations possess the resources and ability to address genuine problems, why shouldn’t they?
That’s probably the strongest argument for stakeholder capitalism.
And I don’t dismiss it.
My answer is:
Speed is not legitimacy.
A legislature is maddeningly slow partly because it is supposed to be difficult for one group of people to impose its preferences upon everyone else.
Laws can be challenged.
Legislators can be removed.
Statutes can be repealed.
States can challenge Washington.
Courts can strike actions down.
Bad legislation can eventually be changed by people who did not write it.
Corporate social governance often has no comparable mechanism.
I didn’t elect BlackRock’s CEO.
I cannot vote against Google.
I cannot introduce legislation changing my bank’s social priorities.
And if concentrated industries leave me without a meaningful alternative, “take your business somewhere else” becomes increasingly fictional.
So yes, democratic government is frustratingly slow.
Sometimes that frustration is a feature.
The question isn’t merely whether someone can act quickly. It is whether that someone has legitimate authority to act for everyone else.
What Shareholder Capitalism Was Supposed to Be
Milton Friedman’s famous 1970 essay about corporate responsibility is often reduced to “profits at all costs.”
That is a caricature.
His argument placed corporations inside a framework of law and ethical custom. Society establishes the rules; corporate management pursues the economic interests of the business inside those rules.
That’s much closer to the system I believe works.
Shareholder capitalism inside a functioning constitutional republic.
Government establishes legal boundaries.
Corporations operate inside them.
Consumers decide whether they want what corporations produce.
If a company commits fraud, prosecute it. If it sells a dangerous product, regulate it. If it causes genuine environmental harm, restrain it. If it destroys competition, enforce antitrust law.
Within those boundaries?
Leave it alone.
Build a refrigerator. Write software. Develop medicine. Manufacture a hose. Open a restaurant.
Take a risk.
Fail spectacularly.
Try again.
Make a fortune if millions of people voluntarily decide you’ve created something useful.
Consumers get a check of their own.
Don’t like Ford? Buy Toyota.
Don’t like Target? Shop somewhere else.
Think a company has become obnoxiously political? Stop giving it your money.
A functioning free market requires the ability to say no.
That gets harder when a handful of companies control an industry, all adopt essentially the same practices and the barriers to creating another competitor become enormous.
That’s why antitrust isn’t anti-capitalist.
It protects competition.
The traditional arrangement doesn’t require corporations to be virtuous. It simply requires that corporations are not sovereign.
Government checks corporations through law.
Consumers check corporations through competition.
Citizens check government through elections and constitutional rights.
Corporations retain autonomy inside that framework.
Power is divided.
That principle is underneath everything else I’m arguing.
The Path of Least Resistance
Now suppose government wants something done.
It can pass a law.
Unfortunately, passing laws is annoying.
There are legislators, courts, states, constituents and elections.
The Constitution occasionally gets in the way.
A giant corporation has fewer inconveniences.
A technology platform can change its terms of service. A bank can alter lending requirements. An employer can change workplace policies. An insurer can change underwriting standards. A payment processor can decide who gets access. An investment firm can decide where capital goes.
Government doesn’t always have to order anything.
Pressure can work.
Encouragement can work.
Mutual interest can work.
And corporations want things from government too: favorable regulations, contracts, subsidies, tax treatment, access and barriers that make life harder for smaller competitors.
No smoke-filled room is required.
No secret handshake.
No Bond villain.
The incentives do the work.
Government discovers that corporations can accomplish things government has difficulty accomplishing directly.
Corporations discover that government can protect corporate interests in ways ordinary competition cannot.
Stakeholder thinking matters here because it gives corporate management a ready-made justification for participating.
If a corporation believes it has an affirmative responsibility for public health, information integrity, equity, climate or some other broad social objective, cooperation with government can be described not as entering politics but as fulfilling its responsibilities to stakeholders.
That is the bridge.
And we don’t have to imagine how indirect government pressure might work.
We’ve already seen versions of it.
Operation Choke Point
Operation Choke Point began during the Obama administration as a Justice Department effort targeting fraud involving banks and payment processors.
Fraud is a legitimate target.
The controversy came from something broader.
Bank regulators also used concepts such as reputational risk when supervising financial institutions serving certain categories of businesses—including some businesses that were perfectly legal.
A 2014 House Oversight investigation argued that federal regulators had pressured banks to terminate relationships with lawful businesses considered undesirable or risky.
The government disputed some of the broader accusations surrounding Operation Choke Point, and it would be inaccurate to simplify the entire program into “Obama ordered banks to close businesses he disliked.”
But the regulatory problem was real enough that the FDIC resolved the resulting lawsuit in 2019. In the settlement materials, the agency acknowledged that certain employees had acted inconsistently with FDIC policies regarding payday lenders and that the conduct had created misperceptions about the agency’s policies.
I should be fair about the counterarguments.
The OCC was dismissed from the lawsuit entirely and made no concessions. It has consistently maintained it never participated in Operation Choke Point at all.
And the FDIC’s own Inspector General concluded that the agency’s involvement fell within its broad authorities, was limited to a few staff and was inconsequential to the overall direction of the initiative.
Fine.
Take all of that at face value.
My argument doesn’t require the program to have been large.
It requires the mechanism to have been available.
A handful of officials. A few private conversations. No statute. No hearing. No published rule. No record anyone outside the room could obtain.
And a lawful business loses its bank account.
If a small number of people acting outside stated policy could accomplish that, the problem was never the size of the program.
The problem is that the tool was sitting there.
The mechanism is what interests me.
Government didn’t have to persuade Congress to make every disfavored business illegal.
Banks already possessed enormous private power to determine who had access to the financial system.
Regulatory pressure plus corporate risk management could do a remarkable amount of work.
The bank says:
“We made a business decision.”
The regulator says:
“We never ordered them to close the account.”
The business still loses access to banking.
That’s exactly why the distinction between public and private power matters.
And the story has an interesting ending.
On April 7, 2026, the OCC and FDIC adopted a final rule eliminating reputation risk from their supervisory programs. The rule was published April 10 and takes effect June 9, 2026. It prohibits those regulators from requiring, instructing or encouraging banks to terminate or restrict services based upon political, social, cultural or religious views, constitutionally protected speech, or lawful but politically disfavored activities solely because of reputational concerns.
I support that result.
But notice how we got there.
The rule followed President Trump’s August 7, 2025 executive order, Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans, which directed federal banking regulators to eliminate the use of reputational risk where it could facilitate politicized or unlawful debanking.
So the response to executive-branch regulatory discretion was another president directing the executive branch to exercise regulatory discretion differently.
Better than leaving the problem alone?
Absolutely.
A durable structural safeguard?
I’m less convinced.
A future administration inherits much of the same machinery.
Personnel changed. Power didn’t.
That is why I care more about constraining the mechanism than ensuring that my preferred people control it.
The Social-Media Version
The COVID-era relationship between government and social-media companies presents a newer version of the same problem.
Federal officials communicated repeatedly with major platforms about content moderation. In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court examined interactions involving COVID information, elections and platform moderation.
The majority concluded that the plaintiffs had not sufficiently connected particular moderation decisions to particular government actions and criticized parts of the lower court’s treatment of the record. The Court also emphasized that platforms possessed independent incentives to moderate content.
At the same time, the Court did not reach the broader constitutional merits because the plaintiffs lacked standing to obtain the forward-looking injunction they sought.
Mark Zuckerberg later wrote in an August 26, 2024 letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta’s teams regarding certain COVID content, including humor and satire.
So the responsible conclusion isn’t:
“The Supreme Court proved the government secretly censored everyone.”
It didn’t.
Nor is the responsible conclusion:
“Nothing happened.”
Something clearly did.
The important questions are where persuasion becomes coercion, how a citizen demonstrates that government actually caused a private decision, who has standing to challenge it and what remedy exists once the line is crossed.
This is where I discovered that one of the constitutional reforms I originally thought we needed already exists.
We Already Have the Principle
My first instinct was that we needed a constitutional amendment saying something like:
Government shall not induce, coerce or delegate to a private entity an action government itself would be constitutionally prohibited from taking.
Turns out the Supreme Court said essentially that more than fifty years ago.
In Norwood v. Harrison in 1973, the Court stated that a state may not “induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
Well.
There it is.
That actually makes the problem more interesting.
Maybe we don’t need another constitutional principle.
Maybe we need a practical way to enforce the principle already there.
Standing matters.
Causation matters.
Discovery matters.
Remedies matter.
Nor should someone be able to win a constitutional lawsuit merely by saying, “I think government and corporations are too cozy.”
But when government operates through informal communications, private intermediaries and regulatory pressure, proving the exact causal chain necessary to vindicate constitutional rights can become extraordinarily difficult.
So the better question isn’t:
How do we invent a new right?
It’s:
How do we make existing constitutional restraints meaningful when government operates indirectly?
That’s harder.
It’s also much more useful.
From Stakeholder Capitalism to Political Capture
The flow doesn’t only go from government into corporations.
Private power reaches back into government.
This is where stakeholder capitalism connects directly to lobbying and campaign finance.
The common problem is:
discretion without accountability, concentration, and proximity to state power.
Stakeholder governance expands the discretion of powerful private institutions.
Jawboning gives government a way to reach through those institutions.
Lobbying and campaign finance give those institutions a way to reach back into government.
Now the circle closes.
Government is supposed to check corporations.
Corporations are supposed to remain independent of government.
Citizens are supposed to stand above government as voters and above corporations as consumers.
Instead, each large institution gains an incentive to cultivate the others.
And the citizen increasingly finds himself beneath all of them.
Follow the Money
During the 2023–2024 federal election cycle, Federal Election Commission filings show presidential candidates raising about $2 billion, congressional candidates roughly $3.8 billion, party committees about $2.7 billion, and PACs reporting approximately $15.7 billion in receipts.
Independent expenditures totaled approximately $4.4 billion.
One important caveat: don’t simply add those figures together and call the result “the cost of the election.” PAC receipts are gross receipts across thousands of committees and may include transfers between political organizations.
The numbers nevertheless demonstrate the scale of the financial machinery surrounding American politics.
Federal lobbying hit another record in 2024. OpenSecrets’ analysis of federal lobbying disclosures put spending at roughly $4.4 billion.
I don’t think every lobbyist is corrupt.
I don’t think every campaign contribution buys a politician.
It doesn’t have to.
I can email my senator.
A multinational corporation can retain attorneys, former public officials, regulatory specialists and policy experts whose entire working day revolves around influencing the people writing laws.
Technically, we’re both participating.
Sure.
And technically my son’s Little League team and the New York Yankees are both baseball organizations.
The right to petition government should never become the right to purchase proximity to government.
What I Mean When I Say “Ban Lobbying”
My instinct is still to say:
Ban lobbying.
But the more seriously I think about it, the more qualification that statement needs.
A manufacturer explaining a technical regulation to Congress is lobbying.
A civil-rights organization advocating legislation is lobbying.
A church objecting to legislation affecting religious liberty is lobbying.
A union describing workplace conditions is lobbying.
And paying someone with specialized knowledge to advocate for you isn’t inherently corrupt. We hire lawyers for essentially the same reason.
So my actual objection isn’t expertise.
It isn’t petitioning.
It isn’t organized speech.
It’s purchased access and the revolving market between public authority and private influence.
That’s where reform should concentrate.
Former senior officials should face long cooling-off periods before lobbying the agencies or committees they controlled.
Substantive meetings between lobbyists and policymakers should be disclosed quickly and publicly.
The relationship between campaign contributions and active lobbying deserves much stronger separation.
The revolving door should be attacked aggressively.
A regulator should not spend Monday writing rules governing an industry and Tuesday negotiating a seven-figure job with it.
A legislator should not treat elected office as an audition for K Street.
I don’t pretend one statute cleanly solves all of this.
But preserving the right to petition government does not require preserving an enormous industry built around privileged access to it.
Kentucky’s $37 Million Congressional Primary
The 2026 Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District provides a nearly perfect illustration of what happens when political influence becomes a financial arms race.
Thomas Massie had represented the district since 2012.
The arrangement should have been simple:
People who live in Kentucky’s 4th District decide whether they want Thomas Massie representing them.
Instead, the primary became the most expensive House primary in American history.
According to Kentucky Public Radio’s post-election accounting, approximately $37 million was spent by the campaigns and aligned PACs, with more than $25 million coming from PAC spending.
Gallrein’s campaign spent roughly $3 million itself, while three outside super PACs spent approximately $15.5 million helping defeat Massie.
Pro-Israel organizations were major participants. AIPAC-funded United Democracy Project spent roughly $4.1 million, while the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund spent another $3.9 million.
AIPAC is an American organization funded by Americans. It is not legally an arm of the Israeli government. It openly advocates policies strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship.
That’s legal.
I still don’t like a system in which any national organization centered around a particular foreign-policy relationship can spend millions shaping who represents a congressional district in Kentucky.
I’d say exactly the same thing about Canada, Mexico, China, Russia, Britain, India or Brazil.
Israel isn’t the principle.
The principle is the principle.
If Kentucky voters dislike Massie’s position on Israel, vote him out. If they dislike his position on spending, vote him out. If they simply find him irritating, vote him out.
It’s their district.
And they did.
Gallrein defeated Massie by roughly ten points.
But Massie’s side wasn’t pure either.
Five pro-Massie PACs spent roughly $9.6 million on independent advertising, and the largest raises exactly the kind of transparency problem I’m complaining about.
Kentucky 4th PAC spent about $6.6 million supporting Massie. Most of its reported funding came through a recently created Delaware nonprofit called Tamarack Aspen Inc., which listed a Dallas FedEx location as its mailing address and had little identifiable public presence.
The Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint alleging Tamarack Aspen was being used to conceal the true source of millions of dollars.
That’s an allegation.
It isn’t a finding of guilt.
But it illustrates the problem beautifully.
This isn’t really about Gallrein.
It isn’t Massie.
It isn’t AIPAC.
It isn’t Tamarack Aspen.
It’s the system.
Once one side pours millions into a congressional district, the other side either raises national money too or accepts a massive competitive disadvantage.
Then the first raises more.
Then the second raises more.
Eventually everyone is financed by outsiders, and each side points at the other’s outside money as justification for its own.
Exactly.
That’s the trap.
Why should either side need it?
Omnibus Bills Make It Worse
Massie also illustrates another problem: omnibus legislation.
Take hundreds of policy decisions and place them inside one enormous bill.
Force a representative to vote yes or no.
Now every provision becomes a future attack ad.
Find a popular benefit buried somewhere on page 800.
“He voted against it!”
Maybe.
He also voted against the other 799 pages.
That doesn’t mean Massie—or anyone else—was correct about every omnibus vote.
It means voters should be able to determine what their representative actually supported.
Instead, enormous packages allow legislators to hide unpopular provisions behind popular ones and political organizations to convert complicated legislative decisions into emotionally effective thirty-second advertisements.
Combine that with millions in outside spending and wealthy institutions can purchase an extraordinary amount of the information environment surrounding an election.
Nobody needs to steal ballots.
Nobody has to fake a result.
The election can be entirely legal.
That doesn’t mean political power surrounding the election is evenly distributed.
The previous House-primary spending record belonged to the other party: the 2024 Democratic primary that removed Jamaal Bowman in New York.
Forget Massie.
Forget Bowman.
Here’s the principle:
A representative should fear the voters in his district more than the donors outside it.
Campaign Finance Is Harder Than I Want It to Be
My instinctive answer is radical.
Get private money out of political campaigns.
Create tightly constrained public financing. Establish neutral qualifications. Give legitimate smaller parties meaningful opportunities. Hold serious public debates. Shorten the endless advertising season.
I still like that direction.
But my own argument immediately creates a problem:
Who decides who qualifies?
If I distrust corporate managers claiming to represent society, I should probably also distrust a government commission empowered to determine which political movements are legitimate enough to receive public money or participate in debates.
That’s not a small objection.
Any public-financing system would need mechanical, viewpoint-neutral rules designed to be exceptionally difficult for incumbents to manipulate.
The First Amendment issue is equally real.
Citizens United v. FEC protects independent political expenditures as political speech.
I don’t like where our campaign-finance system has ended up.
I also don’t want government telling me I can’t write an essay saying “Vote for Thomas Massie.”
A newspaper must remain free to endorse candidates.
Citizens must remain free to organize.
Political movements have to remain free to attack incumbents.
So I don’t have a neat constitutional formula.
The challenge is separating the right to speak about an election from the ability to purchase the information environment surrounding an election.
That’s difficult.
It is still worth figuring out.
The Fed and the Same Problem
The Federal Reserve presents the same structural problem from another direction.
It possesses enormous discretion.
It has limited direct electoral accountability.
And it necessarily operates in extremely close proximity to the financial institutions and markets affected by its decisions.
That doesn’t make the Fed sinister.
It makes transparency important.
“Audit the Fed” is catchy, but it can imply that the Federal Reserve currently operates without audits.
It doesn’t.
The Federal Reserve describes multiple layers of independent auditing and GAO review, and Dodd-Frank expanded GAO authority in areas including emergency lending.
My concern is scope and accountability.
An institution capable of dramatically affecting money, credit, interest rates, asset values and the broader economy exercises extraordinary public power.
My rule here is simple:
Extraordinary public power deserves extraordinary public transparency.
Central-bank independence from short-term electoral politics may serve legitimate purposes.
Independence from accountability does not.
The Founders Built Checks for the Power They Knew
The Constitution is basically an elaborate document saying:
We probably shouldn’t trust any of these people too much.
The president checks Congress. Congress checks the president. Courts check both. Congress is divided against itself. States retain their own governments. Voters periodically get another chance to throw people out.
It’s a remarkably pessimistic view of human nature.
Which is probably why it works.
The Founders weren’t ignorant of economic power. They knew banks, monopolies, chartered corporations and mercantilism, and they fought almost immediately over centralized finance.
Hamilton championed the First Bank of the United States. Jefferson opposed it. Madison initially opposed national banking and later approved the Second Bank after the War of 1812.
As Federal Reserve History explains, America experimented with central banking early but not continuously. The First Bank’s charter expired in 1811. The Second Bank’s federal charter expired in 1836. The Federal Reserve wasn’t created until 1913.
So suspicion of concentrated financial power isn’t some new internet conspiracy theory.
It’s almost a founding tradition.
But the bigger problem is scale.
Hamilton understood a national bank.
Could he have imagined Google?
Could Jefferson have imagined a corporation collecting behavioral information from hundreds of millions of people?
Could Madison have imagined privately operated communications networks connecting billions?
Could any of them have imagined multinational corporations with economic, informational and technological resources comparable to governments?
They built elaborate checks against the concentrated public power they knew.
Our challenge is preserving the same principle in a world where private institutions can become extraordinarily powerful too.
And an important distinction matters here.
I’m not arguing that government should become too weak to check corporations.
Quite the opposite.
The more powerful an institution becomes, the more carefully its authority should be limited to checking other concentrations of power—not directing society itself.
Government needs enough legitimate authority to enforce antitrust law.
Courts need enough authority to protect constitutional rights.
States need enough authority to check Washington.
Consumers need enough alternatives to check corporations.
Citizens need enough political power to check all of them.
That isn’t unlimited government.
It’s divided power.
United Is a Political Condition
Here is where I think we screw this up most spectacularly.
We divide ourselves before we begin.
Republican and Democrat.
Liberal and conservative.
Religious and secular.
Urban and rural.
Then we scream at one another while the machinery keeps operating.
I don’t need my Democratic neighbor to agree with me about guns, abortion, taxes or Donald Trump before we can agree that neither of us should have to compete politically against a multibillion-dollar influence industry.
He doesn’t need me to agree with him about healthcare or climate policy before we can agree that legislators should be accountable for individual votes and corporations shouldn’t possess dramatically greater access to our government than either of us does.
We’re going to disagree.
Good.
Free people do that.
Some disagreements are serious enough that we’re never resolving them over a beer.
Fine.
Unity is not uniformity.
Unity means recognizing that the guy across the fence who is spectacularly wrong about half of politics still shares my interest in remaining a free citizen.
I think we’ve forgotten that.
And concentrated power benefits when we do.
That doesn’t require believing every cultural controversy is manufactured.
People are perfectly capable of hating one another without institutional assistance.
But there is certainly money and political advantage in keeping us scared, angry, online and divided.
Outrage generates clicks.
Fear generates votes.
Division generates donations.
And isolated people aren’t particularly powerful.
We know the political opinions of strangers 900 miles away and sometimes don’t know the name of the person three doors down.
That’s terrible soil for self-government.
So vote.
Yes, I know.
Almost comical at this point.
Vote anyway.
Run for local office if you can. Attend meetings. Know who sits on your city council and school board. Make government local enough that officials occasionally have to look the people affected by their decisions in the face.
And do something even simpler.
Turn off the television. Put down the damn phone. Go talk to your neighbor.
Especially the one who disagrees with you.
Talk politics.
Talk religion.
Talk about your town.
Piss each other off.
Then talk again.
Know people. Go to church. Volunteer. Coach. Join something. Organize your neighborhood. Help somebody who can’t do anything for you in return.
“Community organizing” somehow became partisan terminology.
It shouldn’t be.
It’s power.
One angry person online is noise.
Ten neighbors are annoying.
A neighborhood is harder to dismiss.
A town becomes a problem.
Millions of citizens who disagree about plenty but agree that their government belongs to them become something else entirely.
That is the point.
Not kumbaya.
Not pretending our differences aren’t real.
Unity.
Government requires our consent.
Politicians require our votes.
Corporations require our money.
Media companies require our attention.
Technology companies require our participation.
A surprising amount of institutional power begins with things we voluntarily hand over.
Maybe our power hasn’t vanished as completely as we think.
Maybe much of it has simply been conscripted.
Take some back.
Revolution?
Eventually the uncomfortable question arrives.
What happens if peaceful reform stops working?
What happens if institutions become so captured that citizens no longer possess meaningful political recourse?
I’m not going to pretend revolution is historically unthinkable.
That would be a particularly funny thing for an American to say.
Our country exists because men eventually concluded their relationship with Britain was beyond repair.
But revolutions have a problem.
They’re usually much better at destroying political orders than creating freer replacements.
Power doesn’t disappear when the old order collapses.
Someone picks it up.
Usually someone who really, really wants it.
And this is where the premise I mentioned at the beginning matters.
The problem isn’t simply that bad people acquire power.
The problem is that people acquire power.
Including me.
Including you.
Including politicians I vote for.
Including people who share my theology.
Including people who agree with every word of this essay.
We’re sinners too.
That is why checks and balances matter.
It is also why I am deeply suspicious of the idea that everything could finally be put right if our side just acquired enough control.
Our people running Washington.
Our judges.
Our institutions.
Our corporations.
Our schools.
Give us enough power and we’ll fix everything.
No we won’t.
Political utopianism eventually starts sounding suspiciously theological.
Give mankind enough power and mankind will remake the world.
That position is already occupied.
The First Commandment still applies during political crisis.
God is God.
We aren’t.
Faith Isn’t Passivity
That doesn’t mean Christians withdraw and wait for God to clean everything up.
Faith without works is dead.
Raise your family. Know your neighbors. Help your community. Protect the weak. Speak truth. Vote. Serve. Build businesses. Build churches. Build institutions. Defend liberty and personal property. Exercise your rights.
Refuse to surrender your conscience because a corporation, regulator, university or government agency tells you doing so is “responsible.”
But don’t worship politics either.
Don’t put your faith in Donald Trump.
Don’t put it in the next Democrat.
Don’t put it in a political party.
Don’t convince yourself salvation is one election away.
And don’t let somebody convince you to hate your neighbor because an algorithm sorted the two of you into opposing political tribes.
God remains in control.
That should make us less afraid.
It shouldn’t make us passive.
I Don’t Want to Be a Stakeholder
Stakeholder capitalism gets one thing right.
Corporations affect people besides shareholders.
Absolutely.
But stakeholder capitalism looks at increasingly powerful corporations and says:
Let’s give them more responsibility for society.
I look at the same corporations and reach the opposite conclusion.
Powerful institutions need boundaries.
Not helplessness.
Not destruction.
Boundaries.
Government should be strong enough to enforce the Constitution and competitive markets but constrained from directing private life beyond its legitimate authority.
Corporations should be free enough to innovate and compete but constrained from becoming political sovereigns.
Citizens should possess real political rights.
Consumers should possess real alternatives.
States and communities should retain enough authority that every meaningful question doesn’t eventually end in Washington.
And institutions should check one another through public, lawful and contestable means—not through quiet alliances nobody outside the room can see.
That’s the principle.
Not weak institutions.
Divided power.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about the word stakeholder.
It sounds inclusive.
Everyone gets a seat at the table.
How nice.
Except I don’t want BlackRock, Google, Washington, an NGO, an ISO committee or a university administrator sitting around a table deciding what my “stake” is and how best to represent it.
I don’t want to be their stakeholder.
I want to be a citizen.
A representative should fear the voters in his district more than the donors outside it.
A corporation should fear losing its customers more than it desires favor from Washington.
Government should fear violating the Constitution more than it desires cooperation from corporate America.
And all of us should remember that disagreeing with our neighbor does not require surrendering our common interest in remaining free.
The answer to concentrated power isn’t finding better people to wield it.
It isn’t broadening their mandate.
It’s dividing the power.