Before we begin, a confession, because you should always know where a man is standing before he starts swinging.
I’m a capitalist.
Not the apologetic kind—not the guy who whispers it at a dinner party and then orders the fair-trade branzino to square things with the universe. I mean it all the way down. Capitalism paid my bills. It fed my kids. It bought the guitar I’m not good enough to deserve and the second guitar I bought to distract myself from the first one. I’ve built companies, sold companies, blown up companies, and been fired from companies, sometimes in that exact order and once before lunch. Capitalism gave me all of it. The wins, the exits, the scars, the material.
I’m a capitalist the way some people are Catholic. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a religion. I believe in the market the way my grandmother believed in the rosary—privately, stubbornly, and with the occasional bout of guilt.
So understand that when I tell you I’m scared of it, it’s not the fear of a stranger. It’s the fear of a spouse.
Here’s the thing about a religion. You don’t get to run the government with it.
We figured that out a while ago. The Founders—flawed, brilliant, wildly overdressed for the climate—looked at a couple thousand years of Europe setting itself on fire over which invisible thing to kneel to, and they did something radical. They separated church and state. Not because they hated God. A lot of them were devout. They did it because they’d seen what happens when the thing you worship gets its hands on the thing that arrests you. They separated the two to protect both. The state stayed honest. The church stayed holy. Everybody kept their hands where we could see them.
I want the same deal for capitalism.
I want a separation of capitalism and state.
Because here’s the punchline, and it’s not a funny one: the money already moved in. It didn’t knock. It doesn’t rent. It bought the building.
One Person, One Vote (Terms and Conditions Apply)
In 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, and in doing so established two of the most beautiful legal fictions ever written by a robed human being: corporations are people, and money is speech.
I run a coaching practice. I have facilitated rooms full of actual CEOs. I can report to you, under oath, that I have never once seen a corporation cry at a wedding, throw out its back, or apologize to its wife. A corporation is not a person. It’s a very ambitious spreadsheet with a legal department. But the Court said otherwise, and once money became speech, the loudest voice in the room became a checkbook.
That’s when the Super PACs bloomed like mold in a wet basement. Unlimited money, softly laundered through committees with names like Americans for a Stronger Tomorrow and Patriots Who Definitely Aren’t Just One Guy. You cannot see who’s talking. You can only see how loud.
And here’s the drift, the slow tectonic slide nobody scheduled a vote on. We were sold one person, one vote. Prettiest sentence in the whole American songbook. But we are quietly, dollar by dollar, refinancing it into one dollar, one vote. And in that economy, I promise you, you and I are not the whales. We’re the plankton with opinions.
I love markets. Markets are the best mechanism humans ever built for sorting out who wants the shrimp fried rice and who wants the pad thai. But a market inside a democracy is a guest. The second it starts choosing the host—the second the capital picks the candidates, writes the laws, and staffs the referees—it stops being a market. It becomes a monopoly with a flag.
And Now, the Weather, Brought to You by a Billionaire
Which brings us to the part where they bought the megaphone too. Because owning the votes is efficient, but owning the story is elegant.
Rupert Murdoch wrote the template decades ago. Fox wasn’t a news channel that drifted into a worldview. It was a worldview that commissioned a news channel. He proved you could turn a point of view into a public utility, pipe it into the living room, and bill for it. Genius, in the way a heist is genius.
Then Jeff Bezos—richest man on several available planets—bought The Washington Post. Democracy Dies in Darkness, the masthead says, which is a hell of a slogan to run under a guy who spiked his own paper’s presidential endorsement and watched a quarter-million readers cancel on the way out the door. The lights were on. Something died anyway.
And now the main event. David Ellison’s Skydance swallowed Paramount whole, which means it swallowed CBS News, which means 60 Minutes—the closest thing broadcast journalism has to a cathedral—now answers to a man who installed a hand-picked editor-in-chief and started steering. And Ellison isn’t finished. He’s running a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and the prize inside that piñata is CNN. A President who has wanted CNN sold and softened for years is, by wild coincidence, close friends with the family funding the bid. The regulators looked it over and waved it through without asking anyone to sell so much as a folding chair.
Do the arithmetic on that. Fox. The Post. CBS. And soon, CNN. Fewer and fewer hands on more and more of the story, and every one of those hands has a very specific reason to want you looking left when the wallet’s on the right.
I want to be precise here, because precision is the whole job. This is not capitalism failing. This is capitalism succeeding—doing exactly what capital does, which is flow toward power and pool wherever it isn’t stopped. Capital is water. It’s not evil. It’s just relentless, and it will find every crack you leave open.
Our job—mine, yours, the whole cranky congregation—was to leave fewer cracks.
The Sermon, Such As It Is
So no, I haven’t lost my religion. I’m still a capitalist. Come Monday I’ll be out there generating margin like it’s a moral duty, because for me it kind of is.
But I want my religion where religion belongs. In the sanctuary. In the marketplace. In the beautiful, brutal, honest business of building something and finding out if anybody wants to buy it. I do not want it in the voting booth. I do not want it holding the pen on the laws. I do not want it deciding, from behind four different anchor desks, what I’m allowed to be angry about tonight.
Give me the separation of capitalism and state. Not to weaken the market. To save it—the same way we saved the church, by loving it enough to keep it out of the building where they keep the handcuffs.
I’m a capitalist. That’s not the disclaimer at the top of this argument.
It’s the reason for the whole thing.
