In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
Americans rejected monarchy 250 years ago. So why do we now defend an economic system that allows a microscopic fraction of humanity to accumulate extraordinary wealth, influence, and political power?
Sharon Kyle for LA Progressive
If “No More Kings” is truly our national motto, then we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: why do we act as if billionaires are entitled to divine rights?
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans rejected monarchy, well, at least in principle we rejected the notion that society should be organized around permanent hierarchies where ordinary people existed largely to enrich elites.
And yet today, many Americans passionately defend an economic system that allows fewer than 3,500 billionaires — roughly 0.00004% of humanity — to accumulate planetary levels of wealth, influence and by extension, political power.
We Rejected Kings — So Why Do We Admire Oligarchs?
We say we oppose kings. Yet we admire oligarchs? Do we not see the parallels?
How did that happen?
Part of the answer lies in the mythology surrounding billionaire wealth. Many people admire billionaires because they believe these individuals simply “worked harder” than everyone else. But harder at what?
Millions of Americans work brutally hard:
teachers, nurses, warehouse workers, caregivers, construction workers, farmworkers, sanitation workers.
None become billionaires through their labor.
That reality forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: no single human being can labor enough hours in one lifetime to personally generate a billion dollars – not through their personal labor alone.
The Mythology of the “Self-Made” Billionaire
Billionaire fortunes become possible only in a system that allows one person to be positioned to collect wealth generated collectively by millions of workers, consumers, and the broader public.
Billionaire wealth is typically accumulated through what the tax code calls “unearned income” — income derived not primarily from a person’s direct labor, but from ownership of assets such as stocks, investments, real estate, intellectual property, or corporate equity. The term itself reveals something important: once wealth reaches a certain scale, money increasingly comes not from working, but from controlling assets.
How Wealth Created by Millions Flows Upward to the Few
This does not mean every billionaire is personally evil. It does mean that billionaire fortunes emerge from systems designed to concentrate wealth upward as opposed to distributing it more equitably.
By that I mean wealth and benefits created collectively by large numbers of people end up flowing disproportionately to a small group at the top. The people whose labor, consumption, and participation help generate that wealth rarely retain a proportional share of the value they created.
For example:
- Workers build products.
- Customers buy the products.
- Communities provide roads, schools, and public services that make all of this possible.
- But most of the money and profit ends up in the hands of owners, executives, or investors.
So the value created collectively by workers, consumers, and the broader public becomes concentrated upward into fewer and fewer hands, while many of the people whose labor made that wealth possible struggle merely to survive.
That distinction matters.
FDR Understood That Concentrated Wealth Threatened Democracy
One LA Progressive reader pushed back on my criticism of billionaire political influence by invoking Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie. She argued that some wealthy people have used their fortunes for social good. That is true.
FDR fought the “economic royalists.” Carnegie funded libraries, universities, and peace initiatives. Oprah Winfrey built a media empire while uplifting millions of people culturally and emotionally.
But none of those examples actually refute the structural problem that billionaire status threatens democracy.
In fact, they illuminate it.
Carnegie’s libraries did not erase the brutal labor conditions of the Gilded Age that helped create his steel fortune. Oprah did not become a billionaire merely by working hard as a talk show host; she became a billionaire because she owned scalable media infrastructure and intellectual property. Even FDR recognized that concentrated economic power threatened democracy itself — which is why he sought to regulate capital, strengthen labor, and build public systems like Social Security.
The Rise of the Benevolent Billionaire Narrative
The question is not whether some billionaires later choose to do good things. Even during the era when monarchies reigned, there were monarchs who weren’t all bad but we still saw the need to overthrow the monarchical rule.
That is the logic behind Marjorie Kelly’s book, “The Divine Right of Capital.” Just as monarchies once taught people that royalty was naturally entitled to rule, modern oligarchic culture teaches people that billionaires are uniquely qualified to shape politics, media, education, philanthropy, and public life. Over time, democracy itself weakens because concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power, and ordinary citizens begin to matter less than those wealthy enough to fund campaigns, shape narratives, and influence institutions.
The issue is whether democratic societies should allow any individual to accumulate that much concentrated power in the first place.
Billionaires, Democracy, and the “Divine Right of Capital”
That is the deeper question Marjorie Kelly raises in her book The Divine Right of Capital. Her argument is devastatingly simple: America abolished the divine right of kings while quietly replacing it with the divine right of capital.
We no longer believe bloodlines alone entitle people to rule. Instead, we increasingly believe wealth itself confers moral legitimacy, superior intelligence, and even civic authority.
We defer to billionaires as if massive wealth accumulation is evidence of extraordinary wisdom.
But what if it is primarily evidence of extraordinary access to assets, scale, leverage, and extraction?
That question becomes especially urgent in politics.
Another LA Progressive reader urged me to “give Tom Steyer a chance,” arguing that perhaps wealthy individuals can help persuade racist white Americans to support equality and multiracial democracy.
Perhaps some can.
But my concern is not primarily about whether billionaires are sincere. My concern is that we have normalized the idea that democracy itself requires billionaire patrons and saviors.
That is a dangerous shift.
Because the same system that produces a “benevolent billionaire” also produces oligarchs who undermine civil rights, DEI, labor rights, voting rights, environmental protections, journalism, and democratic accountability.
And once societies become dependent on billionaire philanthropy and billionaire-funded politics, democracy itself begins to erode. Public priorities become shaped not through collective democratic deliberation but through the preferences of wealthy individuals.
Libraries become gifts from industrialists rather than public guarantees.
Healthcare becomes something philanthropists fund rather than a right.
Journalism becomes donor-dependent.
Politics becomes billionaire-mediated.
Even the phrase “self-made billionaire” obscures how wealth is actually produced. No billionaire builds roads alone, educates workers alone, mines resources alone, manufactures products alone, or creates markets alone. Billionaire wealth depends on public infrastructure, collective labor, stable institutions, consumers, and social systems built by entire societies within a system that permits a small minority to capture the most value.
The Difference Between Democracy and Oligarchy
My hope is that eventually we will view extreme concentrations of wealth and power the same way modern societies now view hereditary monarchy — as fundamentally incompatible with maintaining a democratic society.
Somehow we narrate these billionaire fortunes as the triumph of isolated individuals.
That is not economic reality. That is mythology.
To question billionaire power is not to deny that some wealthy people may possess talent, discipline, or even genuine moral conviction. It is to ask whether Justice Louis Brandeis was right: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
If democracy were truly functioning, ordinary people would not need a benevolent billionaire to save them from the political power and unaccountability of a malevolent one.
Because if we truly believe in “No More Kings,” then we should also question systems that allow a microscopic fraction of humanity to accumulate levels of power once reserved for royalty itself.
The crowns are gone.
But the thrones remain.
For more information, check out these resources that focus on wealth inequalty and structural analysis:
Sharon Kyle is the publisher of LA Progressive and a longtime civil rights and democracy advocate. A former law professor, she writes and speaks on race, power, and the structural forces shaping American democracy. https://linktr.ee/laprogressive
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
