Democracy is being fenced off by billionaires and the system where all citizens can have a say in the decisions of our society is at risk.

Just as the English gentry in the 1800s fenced off common lands to force peasants into wage labour and created the modern company structure to enclose their wealth in the legal fiction of corporate personhood with limited liability, today’s billionaires are enclosing the essential systems and structures of modern existence: housing, healthcare, the environment, and democracy.

This the logical endpoint of plutonomy, an economy distorted by significant wealth inequality, where technological gains favour the ultra-wealthy, and policies support endless capital accumulation instead of the needs of everyday people. Extreme wealth concentration is corrosive to the basic premise of a free society, democracy and (with the climate crisis) civilisation itself.

The most pervasive myth of neoliberalism is the lie that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. The truth is that over the last fifty years, the rising tide has lifted only the billionaire yachts. Since 1979, in the USA worker productivity has risen by 70 percent, yet wages grew by only 12 percent. In Australia, “productivity grew four times faster since 2000 than average wages”.

Where did the difference go? It was siphoned up “in the form of business profits, dividend payouts, and executive compensation”. This upwards siphon has transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent over four decades.

A 2023 UBS study confirms billionaires now accumulate more wealth through inheritance than through “entrepreneurship”. As French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated when the return on capital exceeds the rate of growth, wealth inevitably concentrates until it creates a new hereditary aristocracy.

The “self-made man” is a lie used to pacify the working class while dynastic wealth cements its power.

If the economy is rigged, why doesn’t the government fix it? Because the state itself has been captured. The state in a capitalist society ultimately functions to manage the affairs of the economic elites, the ultra-wealthy executives and billionaires owners.

In the US, every dollar a corporation spends on political lobbying results in $6.65 in lower taxes. This capture explains why corporate taxes are cut, why oil and gas companies get free gas in Australia, why there were no consequences for bankers after the Royal Commission, and why intellectual property laws enable the Big Pharma companies to gouge $41 billion from publicly funded covid vaccines.

But beyond the spectacle of lobbying, true corporate power lies deeper, within the quiet machinery of the administrative state itself. The treasury officials, central bankers, and regulators who steer the economy function not as neutral arbiters, but as the “technicians of capital.”

Regardless of which party holds office, these unelected members of the professional managerial class operate under an ideological hegemony where the health of financial markets is viewed as synonymous with the health of the nation. They do not need to be bribed to serve the interests of the asset-owning class, and they do not need to be lobbied by $2000 per hour lobbyists. The professional managerial class share the worldview, the language, of capital.

Their mandate is the stability of the capitalist order, ensuring that even without a single lobbyist dollar spent, the state’s default setting remains firmly locked on preserving the sanctity of profit and the security of accumulated wealth.

The billionaire enclosure extends to the things we need for basic survival. Housing, health care, community safety, energy and water.

With housing, we have seen the destructive distortion of financialisation that has manufactured a housing crisis. By 2030 in the US, institutional investors are projected to own 40 per cent of all single-family rental homes. Private equity firms are turning housing into a pure financial asset, trapping families in a cycle of permanent rent extraction.

In Australia, superannuation is getting into build-to-rent both here and overseas — a form of financialised cannibalism of workers by their own deferred wages.

While proponents claim build-to-rent is a solution to supply shortages, this move worsens and speeds up the financialisation of housing. It transforms housing from a fundamental human right into a yield-generating asset class for institutional capital — it doesn’t matter whether it is Blackrock or Unisuper. It creates a predatory, socially destructive feedback loop where workers’ retirement savings are deployed to construct a permanent rental regime, effectively forcing them to pay rent to their own pension funds to secure a roof over their heads.

Instead of challenging the commodification of housing, industry super funds are cementing it, functioning not as allies of workers, but as ruthlessly efficient landlords that prioritise the rate of return above affordable, secure housing!

Underpinning this enclosure is the ideology and logic of neoliberalism, where the myth of free markets hides the encasement of markets from democratic control. The build-to-rent is expression of class relations: one class owns the means of survival (shelter), and the other must pay a premium just to exist — again, it doesn’t matter whether it is Blackrock or an industry super fund. The corporate power inherent in the financialisation is rentier capitalism where wealth is extracted from control of assets rather than production of something socially useful.

We are rapidly heading towards neo-feudalism and technofeudalism. The only way to stop the billionaire enclosure is to reclaim the commons: politically, economically, and ecologically.