Matt Stoller's take on what it will take to solve current problems: What does a non-oligarch driven America look like?

From Twitter/X: The reason Democrats have no position on the war is because no one has a coherent view on what to do. It’s not on them. 

The U.S. is basically the bank account and army for global oligarchs. This positioning is not good for Americans and it’s not good for the world. But it’s also impossible to imagine an alternative. 

The foreign policy establishment sees their work as a hobby. The U.S. is so endlessly rich and heroic that it’s all a game. They don’t think that the realm of foreign affairs should be good for ordinary people; that’s a rhetorical afterthought. To them the deindustrialization and erosion of the middle class at the heart of the destabilization of the world is sad but necessary, if they bother to notice it at all. 

The left foreign policy world is not actually that different. They are libertarian and hostile to Americans, and they don’t care about economics. Foreign policy to them is a hobby of the rich, it’s just the U.S. is the central villain instead of central hero. They do not understand or care about deindustrialization as a result of Chinese overcapacity, which is a central and fundamental foreign policy challenge. To them that’s handwaving away as ‘economics’ and boring. Let’s just do ‘care’ work, they imagine, as if a nation that makes nothing and imports food can afford to have its young people do nothing but wipe the asses of the old. 

What does a non-oligarch driven America actually do? What does it look like? Well for starters we pull back dramatically from the rest of the world. No troops in Europe, maybe offer some defense weapons to East Asian nations. No presence in the Middle East. Cut Israel loose entirely. Total revamp of our bloated and incompetent military and its corrupt establishment. Fire most admirals and generals and put in a new generation capable of actually thinking. 

This change will require us to be a LOT more protectionist. We put up huge trade barriers so that we can rebuild our industries. We also impose capital controls and confiscate or tax assets held by foreigners. No foreign ownership of land. We are not your bank account, Mr. Saudi Prince or Chinese money launderer. 

Finally, we crush capitalism. Rebuild our farms and factories. No more driving our corporations for shareholders. Lots of public utility regulation or nationalization of assets. No more private equity. No more crypto or corporate gambling. If you want to make money, you do something useful. Otherwise it’s poverty or handcuffs. 

America needs to be run for its people, not for the Epstein Class or for weirdos who can’t go over the Iranian overthrow of the shah or for lefty hobbyists funded by Koch industries to deindustrialize what’s left of what we have.

Rent Controls

 

We had rent controls in Britain until 1915 to 1988 and during this time housebuilding regularly hit over 300k per year. Since they were removed, the house price to income ratio has gone from 4:1 to around 8:1, and housebuilding numbers have collapsed. https://t.co/qRKr062FVg

— Gareth (@g_f_red) March 29, 2026

The myth of supply and demand

 Supply and demand may actually operate in microeconomics, but as Sonnenschein, Mantel and Debreu demonstrated (mathematically!), micro is not a suitable as a foundation for macroeconomics.

 

Vienna has fewer homes per capita than Vancouver. By supply-and-demand logic, the Austrian capital should be more expensive. Yet prices are 50% lower. Why? Because over half of Vienna’s housing is non-market. The issue isn’t supply. It’s commodification. https://t.co/LBo9u2Iic1

— Canadian Dimension (@CDN_Dimension) March 26, 2026

The Historical Precedents for America's Temperament

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner

Thinking about what it took our forefathers to come to the colonies in the New World is daunting. They encountered unimaginable wildness, Indians, and more. It's sensible to conclude that a peculiar insane optimism is one thing that could account for the post-Columbus migrations from Europe to America.

Spanish explorers like Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro made war on the native societies, even discarding their achievements in medicine and mathematics as they did. But what led to most of this largest-historical-genocide that killed 90% of the New World's population was the Old World diseases brought by the explorers themselves, particularly yellow fever and malaria, although measles and smallpox played a role too. 

So the European immigrants encountered a much-weakened native population, and vast stretches of land they abandoned as they died out. And even then, the Europeans fought them.

To work the land where malaria and yellow fever were rampant, the Europeans imported African slaves who had at least some immunity to these diseases. Slavery thrived between the Mason-Dixon line and the northern border of Argentina, where the vector mosquitos for those diseases were. Slavery was necessary, not optional, to grow all that cotton before mosquito eradication was discovered as a preventive.

Meanwhile, when Andrew Jackson stole the southeastern US from the natives--defying both Georgia's and the US Supreme Courts--the cotton planters were ecstatic. They quickly borrowed to buy slaves and farm what was the Cherokee's land as the Indians walked the "Trail of Tears" to move to what would become Oklahoma.

Then, in 1835, Andy Jackson did what many people even today believe would be a good idea. He paid off national debt entirely and closed down the central bank. This meant there were no publicly-issued dollars. People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. 

The planters with their new, stolen land, were unable to pay their loan payments because the cotton surplus made the price of cotton hit the floor, even with 60% of the crop warehoused, and Jackson's debt payoff depleted their dollar savings. A wave of  asset forfeitures and foreclosures ensued. As is the case for all significant reductions of national debt, the economy tanked in the subsequent "Panic of 1837." 

One further bit of encouragement for civil war: slaves tend to not care about long-term soil health, so the typical slaver would deplete his soil, then move west to get more. The North was unwilling to bless making new states in the West slave states.

What can we conclude about the historical precedents for the American temperament? First, unrealistic optimism was an absolute requirement for new immigrants from Europe. Second, perceived economic necessities trumped any reasonable accommodation of the natives, even if they had something to offer. Third, slavery was a clear dedication to putting some (white) people in the driver's seat.

So...has much really changed? 

Meanwhile: JFK and LBJ's Defense chief Robert McNamara dined with his Vietnamese counterparts after the Vietnam war was over and done (and lost by the US). The Vietnamese asked McNamara why the US bothered with Vietnam in the first place. McNamara--by all accounts an intelligent and even charming dinner companion--responded by saying it was to contain China. The Vietnamese were outraged. "We've been fighting China literally for millenia!" was the gist of their response. So that war was simply a waste of men and money. Yet large populations in the US remain optimistic that warfare--now in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran--can have a miraculously wonderful outcome. 

How to respond? Is it sad? Frustrating? Testimony that "The more things change, the more they remain the same"? [sigh!]

The Corruption in the Punishment Bureaucracy

 

I’ve been studying the punishment bureaucracy and suing judges, prosecutors, and police across the U.S. for more than 15 years. One defining feature of our legal system is that there is rarely any accountability for massive corruption and criminality by those with power. This… pic.twitter.com/TELvR3SPWR

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) March 22, 2026

A Letter to Sacramento County Supervisors about Homelessness

 

Dear Public Servants,

I recently attended one of Supervisor Rodriguez's public meetings and was nonplussed by the way she spoke about homeless people. To her (and her accompanying policeman), homelessness is a "choice," driven by mental illness or addiction.

On the other hand, recent surveys of the homeless population say that the number one cause of homelessness is that they are too poor to afford rent, as the following graph amply demonstrates.

 

Truth be told, there are more empty homes than homeless in the US--five times San Francisco's homeless population! Is there any discussion of doing what Vancouver (B.C., Canada) did successfully, enacting a vacant home tax to discourage investors from buying homes and leaving them vacant to artificially curtail the supply of housing? Not that I've heard.

There are some signs of progress in addressing the lack of affordable housing--the Beech Hill Apartments on Beech and Greenback in my neighborhood, for one, but these are slow to appear. And the narrative that says homelessness is the result of some shortage of housing, or a "choice" by the people, or mental illness, or addiction, doesn't help.

Evicting homeless populations from their camps and/or criminalizing homelessness are the County's responses. Even worse are the moves to incarcerate people for the crime of being poor. The County Jail is full, true, but 60% - 80% of its prisoners aren't convicted of anything except being too poor to afford bail. Any discussion of no cash bail or supervised release? Not that I can detect. 

Incidentally, the US and the Philippines are the only countries on earth that require cash bail, and both Illinois and Washington, D.C. have successful no-cash bail programs.

So...are they really mentally ill/addicted? Really? 

Even our response to addiction is misdirected. Here's a video entitled "Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong." 

 

 

 

I encourage you to view it and take it to heart. Sacramento County's management of homelessness and addiction needs to make a U-turn.

Your Constituent,

Mark Dempsey

The Wisdom of the Ages

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Update: Thorstein Veblen Question: If much of modern consumption exists not to meet human needs but to signal status and superiority, why do we treat rising consumption as evidence of prosperity rather than as evidence of social rivalry and waste?