By Robert Kimball Shinkoskey:
The problem with immense concentrations of wealth gathered up into one person’s hands is that it allows them to heavily manipulate the law and election processes in their own favor.
For example, Elon Musk has weighed into the midterm election races with several hundred million dollars in campaign “donations.” What he is really doing is buying the election. With all that money he can bombard innocent and ignorant Americans with oligarchic propaganda (i.e., falsehoods) and convince them with all kinds of political ads that the party of the super-wealthy 1% is the only way to go.
In 2025 Musk offered voters in Wisconsin money to vote the way he wanted them to vote in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. More recently he has offered to give stock in SpaceX to every child in America, an offer made right before the election. This whole process of election bribery is proudly out in the open for the first time in American politics today.
The case of Donald J. Trump is even worse. President Trump treats the $7-8 trillion national budget like his own personal piggy bank. With all that cash in his pocket he is redesigning Washington D.C. in his own image and suing or prosecuting everything that moves a muscle without his permission. He also has implemented new taxes all over the world like illegal tariffs, has obtained outrageous sums of money for the Department of Homeland Security, and has promised to implement a couple dozen different voter bribery schemes to allow his MAGA party to retain power in the 2026 midterm elections and beyond.
Huge piles of money in the hands of a permanent oligarchic aristocracy in America allows those barons to file endless expensive lawsuits so that no real criminal case against them can ever be finally decided. The aristocracy promotes immunity from prosecution by paying off the numerous victims of their crimes and manipulations with cash non-disclosure (i.e. “silence”) agreements. The de-facto king in America can also get huge piles of money from monarchies outside the country like Qatar who want to see America become a gold-digging monarchy instead of a people-building democracy.
What I am saying folks is that unregulated concentration of wealth destroys not only democracy, but every other humanitarian urge known to occasionally guide decisions made by human beings. Money simply does not care about other people. It only cares about honoring and glorifying its owner and solidifying his or her power.
That is why in the Old Testament, Moses fought against Aaron’s proposal to set up a well-heeled golden-calf-style central government system in ancient Israel where the great bulk of the wealth of the nation is concentrated in very few hands. That is exactly the kind of government Israel left behind in Egypt that suppressed, oppressed, and repressed them so regularly and outrageously.
The way to counteract this tendency to excessive accumulation of personal wealth in a democracy is to keep the wealthy out of monopoly power by placing term limits on public office holders, implementing laws regulating campaign “donations,” and making the executive branch of government subservient to the legislative branch. The legislative branch is full of the diverse interests of the people, including many humanitarian and constitutional concerns. The Congress by law is mandated to be the perpetual supreme power in the land, rather than a single well-heeled president who stays in office for life and thus becomes a king. Kingship is also foiled by putting an anti-emoluments provision in the Constitution saying office holders cannot enrich themselves by means of their political position.
Another way the wealthy buy off the people is by publishing endless manipulative and entertaining business advertisements to deprive ordinary folks of not only of their paychecks but of potential educational savings accounts for their children’s futures. They want to drive them into debt so they must borrow at exorbitant interest rates from the wealthy white-collar class and become blue-collar slaves forevermore.
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of books and editorials on democracy, religion, and the American presidency.