The Keys To The Vault

Anne Applebaum’s recent Atlantic article, “MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption,” raises an important question about corruption. But corruption to what end? Perhaps power.

I have long believed that if powerful people want the freedom to do what they want to do, they will do what they need to do to get the keys to the vault. In this case, the vault is the United States government and all the power it possesses.

Viewed that way, MAGA is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a tool for acquiring governmental power through the electoral process. Win enough votes and you gain access to an extraordinary concentration of political, economic, regulatory, diplomatic, and military authority.

Applebaum’s argument is that the lines between public power and private interest are becoming increasingly blurred, as traditional institutional channels give way to personal relationships, unofficial intermediaries, donors, businesspeople, and ideological allies.

That idea connects directly to The Capitalization Game.

Financial capitalization brings future economic value into the present. My Triad—earnings, interest rates, and liquidity—is the endpoint at which these various forces ultimately register in the capitalization process. Politics, technology, regulation, narrative, and other nonfinancial forces are not necessarily capitalized themselves; they matter because they influence the inputs to capitalization.

As aggregate financial value rises, owners of capital possess more wealth. More wealth means more power, and more power means a greater ability to influence the conditions that create still more wealth and power—Soros’s reflexivity writ large. Power begets more power.

Applebaum describes that phenomenon broadly. A recent ProPublica investigation gives us a glimpse of what one such personal relationship can look like. Yet the larger point goes well beyond MAGA and corruption. Capitalism, communism, socialism, and other systems differ enormously, but each can also be viewed as a means of acquiring, organizing, and exercising power.

Is it corrupt to want power? Of course not. It’s what you do with it that matters most. And to what end?

The greatest good. The greatest number. The greatest period of time. The greatest compassion for all living things. Perhaps a higher purpose than power for its own sake.