Principle 07 · Power & Democracy
Distributed Power
How do we prevent economic and technological power from becoming political power?
Build institutions that keep concentrated power accountable.
Why it matters
America should be able to produce extraordinary companies without allowing them to become political authorities.
Economic power can concentrate. Political power cannot.
- Antitrust and platform accountability
- Campaign finance and lobbying limits tied to scale
- Independent oversight of dominant technology and infrastructure
Citizen benefit
Confidence that the biggest company in the country still answers to the same laws — and the same voters — as everyone else.
Measurement
- Political spending concentration by entity
- Regulatory independence indices
- Market share thresholds triggering enhanced oversight
Strongest counterargument
Every institution built to check concentrated power can itself be captured by that same power — regulators are routinely staffed from, and return to, the industries they oversee.
Response
That's a real and historically documented risk, which is why Government Must Remain Accountable to Citizens pairs citizen-facing transparency with institutional oversight — the check isn't only regulators watching companies, it's citizens watching regulators too.
Open questions
- How do you insulate oversight bodies from regulatory capture over multiple decades?
- What's the actual threshold where economic scale requires a political-power check?
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