08/24/2026
Excerpt:…”There is no greater monopoly in the world than the American political system.”
I left CNBC in 2009 because there was a story I couldn't tell there.
I'd had a front-row seat to what I wrote about earlier this week — the decision to make the architects of the financial crisis whole, to let them keep what they'd taken, to set the price of corruption at zero for anyone powerful enough. I watched that happen in real time, from a chair where covering it seriously was, in practice, off the table.
So I went to MSNBC. Not for a bigger platform or a better contract. For one reason: to be somewhere I could hold the government accountable for how it was rewriting the rules after the crisis. That was the whole calculation. Financial reform was the story of the decade and I wanted to be positioned to cover it properly.
Then Barack Obama became president, and financial reform didn't happen.
Not immediately. Not first. Instead, the entire political apparatus pivoted to healthcare — and I watched something I've never fully written about until now.
The healthcare fight consumed everything. All the political capital, all the floor time, all the attention. And what it produced was not the reform of a broken system. It was a mandate that every American purchase a product from an industry that had not been reformed at all.
Think about what that actually is, structurally.
A handful of insurance companies, operating a concentrated market with no meaningful competitive discipline, were handed a legally compelled customer base. The monopoly wasn't broken up or opened to competition. It was guaranteed revenue by federal statute.
Financial reform came later, after healthcare had absorbed the political energy that might have made it meaningful. I was closer to that process than most people know. What emerged was not what anyone who'd watched 2008 from the inside would call structural change.
Two enormous reform efforts. Two industries that needed real restructuring. And in both cases, the outcome was the same: the incumbent players emerged more entrenched than before, and the reform was declared complete.
I spent the next several years trying to understand why, including the entire process of researching and writing Greedy Bastards. I met with policy people, industry people, elected officials, technologists, reformers of every ideological stripe.
Here's what I found, and it's the finding that reorganized how I see all of this.
There is no shortage of good solutions. That's the part almost nobody believes and it's the part I became most certain of.
In healthcare, there are functioning models around the world and pilots inside this country producing better outcomes at lower cost. In education, there are approaches that demonstrably work that remain confined to a handful of districts. In energy, the generation technology has been ready for years. In finance, the structural fixes were well understood in 2009 by people who had spent careers studying exactly this failure mode.
The solutions exist. They're documented. In many cases they've been proven at small scale by people who'd be thrilled to prove them at large scale.
None of it gets adopted. And after years of asking why, I stopped believing it was because the ideas were bad, or the politics were hard, or the timing was wrong.
It's because the system that would have to adopt them has a closed mind — structurally, not attitudinally. And it has a closed mind because it isn't actually in the business of solving problems.
Here's the thing I now believe is the most under-discussed fact in American life.
There is no greater monopoly in the world than the American political system.
Two parties. No meaningful third. Ballot access rules, debate qualification thresholds, and campaign finance structures written and maintained by the two entities that benefit from them. Barriers to entry so high that new competition is functionally impossible — not by accident, but by design, exactly the way a dominant firm builds moats to prevent a rival from ever reaching scale.
Every feature you'd use to diagnose a monopoly in any other industry is present. Limited choice. Degraded service. Unresponsiveness to the customer. Pricing — in this case taxation and regulation — set without competitive discipline. And an incumbent so protected that catastrophic performance produces no exit, because there's nowhere for the customer to go.
We spend enormous energy debating whether tech platforms or health insurers have too much market power. Both of those are real. But neither controls the mechanism that writes the rules for everything else.
And once you see the political system as a monopoly, the fight between the parties looks completely different.
It is not a fight over how to govern. It's a fight over who gets to operate the extraction mechanism.
That's what control of the government now confers: regulatory decisions, tax structures, procurement, subsidies, enforcement discretion, and the power to aim all of it at whichever coalition of interests put you there. The parties aren't competing to deliver value to the taxpayer, because the taxpayer has no exit and therefore no leverage. They're competing to hold the controls.
This explains the thing that confused me for years about the healthcare fight and the financial reform fight. I kept asking why the good solutions weren't on the table. The answer was that the table was never set for solutions. It was set for the question of which set of incumbent interests would be protected and enriched by whichever party won.
Under that framing, the outcomes make perfect sense. A healthcare bill that guarantees revenue to an unreformed insurance oligopoly isn't a failure of reform. It's a successful transaction. A financial reform bill that leaves the structural problem intact isn't a compromise that fell short. It's the product working as designed.
Nobody had to be corrupt in the cartoon sense. The system simply optimized for what it's actually built to optimize for.
That's the connection between everything I've been writing this week.
The zero-cost corruption of 2009 destroyed the moral standing of the institution. The political monopoly ensures there's no competitive mechanism to restore it, because both parties benefit from the arrangement and neither faces a challenger who could force a change. And the abundance of unused solutions sitting in plain sight is the proof of what's actually being optimized for — because a system genuinely trying to solve problems would have adopted at least some of them by now.
The most valuable thing I took from those two years at MSNBC wasn't a story I broke. It was the realization that I'd been asking the wrong question the entire time.
I kept asking why the government wasn't solving these problems.
The right question was whether solving them was ever the objective — or whether the objective was, and remains, control of the largest and most protected monopoly in the world.
