Billionaires Don't Need to Capture the Entire Government Just the parts that keep them rich. When people imagine oligarchy, they tend to imagine billionaires running the government. But billionaires don’t want to run the government. That would be difficult, expensive, and a bad visual. Instead, all they need to do is control the parts of government that guarantee their wealth. A tech billionaire doesn’t want to control agricultural policy. All he wants is a government that doesn’t enforce antitrust laws, takes a hands-off approach to AI, gives his company lucrative government contracts, lowers taxes on his wealth and investment income, lets him to collect and use his customer’s personal data, and protects his company’s intellectual-property. An oil billionaire doesn’t want to run the Department of Education. All he wants is a government that opens more land to drilling, guts environmental regulations, and makes it easier to build the pipelines he needs to sell his oil. A hedge-fund billionaire doesn’t want to oversee the National Park Service. But he does want a government that stays out of the financial markets, keeps capital-gains taxes low, and lets him keep as much of his investment profits as possible. They just want to control the particular policies that matter to them. The economist Mancur Olson had a great metaphor for this. In 1993, he introduced the idea of the “stationary bandit.” Imagine two bandits. The first rides into a village, steals everything he can, and leaves. Olson called him a “roving bandit.” Since he never expects to return, he has every incentive to rape and pillage as much as possible. The second bandit is smarter. He quietly takes control of the village and stays in order to extract wealth over time. He wants farmers to keep farming, merchants to keep selling, and workers to keep producing goods. That’s because a prosperous village generates more money than a ruined one. Olson called this person the stationary bandit. The strategy of today’s billionaires in the U.S. is to be stationary bandits. They want the village to survive, and by village I mean the federal government. They need courts to enforce their contracts, and police to protect their property. They need roads, ports, and airports. They need schools and universities. They need a stable dollar and functioning financial markets. They need patents to protect what they invent and a military to defend their country. Most of all, they need the rule of law because their businesses and fortunes depend on it. So billionaires need the state to keep working even as they take more from it. And they can usually get away with it because most of what they take happens out of public view. Most Americans aren’t following the details of an antitrust case, a change in the capital-gains tax, an environmental rule, or an obscure provision buried in the tax code. But those decisions often divert billions of dollars away from the public and into the hands of a wealthy few. Billionaires also have an enormous advantage in getting what they want. They can hire the best lobbyists and lawyers, underwrite political campaigns, and pay people to game the system. The result is a government that listens much more to the rich than to everyone else. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at almost 1,800 policy fights in the U.S. and found that when wealthy Americans wanted a policy, it tended to become law. When ordinary citizens wanted a policy, it rarely did. This seems all well and good for stationary bandits, but there’s a potential complication. A single stationary bandit tends to restrain himself because he competes with no one. But when you have lots of bandits exploiting the same village, restraint breaks down - each fears that they will lose out if they stop. This is the classic tragedy of the commons: no one wants to destroy the village, but together they inadvertently do. America doesn’t have one bandit. It has thousands. Why should the oil billionaire accept stricter regulation if the hedge-fund billionaire is still getting his tax break? Why should the tech billionaire stop fighting antitrust enforcement if the pharmaceutical billionaire is still fighting limits on drug prices? So everyone keeps taking. And there is no natural stopping point. What happens next? The billionaires’ strategy only works as long as the village remains healthy and the villagers are willing to live with the arrangement. But the more they take, the weaker the village becomes. Eventually, the villagers notice. The rich keep getting richer. The government stops working for them. Their own lives get harder, not easier. That’s when the pitchforks come out.

Trump's billionaires seem to think they can walk away whenever he stops being good for business. But history suggests otherwise. Getting rich was the easy part. Getting out will be harder.