The market speaks of freedom, socialism of fairness—but both bow to power.
As a Dutch citizen whose country had just held its own parliamentary elections, my focus should have been local, yet my attention kept drifting across the Atlantic—to New York, where Zoran Mamdani is decimating his opponents with a democratic socialist agenda. Somehow, what gripped me wasn’t our own politics, but the spectacle of his. And as I followed the arguments of his opponents—some of which echo weekly in The All In Podcast, where a handful of billionaires discuss the world as if it were a company board meeting—I began to notice something: their argument against socialism isn’t really about ideas at all.
Perhaps this focus seems strange. Why should someone in the Netherlands care more about New York politics than their own parliamentary elections? The answer is simple: the United States is the direction-giver for the West. What happens there arrives here a decade later. Dutch politics, for all its sound and fury—and it has plenty, perhaps even more mudslinging than American politics—operates in the shadow of American trends. Our country is small enough that few outside notice, but attentive enough that we see what’s coming. So I watch American politics not out of idle curiosity, but because it shows me our future./
The claim against socialism is always the same. Socialism, they say, is naïve. It makes grand promises, ruins economies, crushes initiative, and ends in decay. The market, by contrast, is nature’s law: the fittest survive, the rest adapt. What they never seem to notice is the irony—that while they proclaim the death of socialism, they speak as a priesthood defending their own cathedral.
Because it’s not idealism versus idealism. It’s power versus power. Ideals are just the flags under which power marches. The billionaires waving the banner of “market rationality” are not defending a principle—they are defending a position. They are not arguing for capitalism as an idea; they are fighting for capitalism as their instrument of control.
If they were truly principled, they would be content with the one democratic principle that all sides claim to share: one person, one vote. That is the only ideology a democracy needs. But they are not content with that. They use their money to multiply their voice, to make one billionaire equal to a million citizens.
What would it actually mean to enforce this principle? It would require campaign finance limits that prevent wealth from translating directly into political influence. It would require media regulations that ensure access to information isn’t monopolized by those who can afford to own the channels. It would require wealth caps or aggressive progressive taxation to prevent the accumulation of resources so vast that they become their own form of sovereignty. These aren’t radical proposals—they’re the logical requirements of taking “one person, one vote” seriously. But they’re also precisely what the billionaire class will never accept, because their power depends on the principle remaining decorative rather than enforceable.
A 2014 study by Gilens and Page at Princeton concluded that America functions less as a democracy and more as an oligarchy: economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence. The study has been debated—some scholars argue it overstates the case, others that it’s methodologically limited—but even the critics don’t claim American democracy is functioning as intended. The range of scholarly opinion runs from “significant elite influence” to “functional oligarchy,” and even the moderate position is damning. What does it mean that we’re debating the degree to which ordinary citizens are powerless? The very fact that this is an open question, rather than an absurd one, tells us something has gone profoundly wrong.
So when they ridicule socialism, it is not because socialism threatens prosperity—it is because socialism threatens power. They pretend to fight bad economics, but what they are really fighting is the redistribution of control.
And if politics is reduced to realpolitik—to the raw mechanics of leverage—then it becomes difficult to condemn the powerless for organizing around whatever ideology gives them weight. If money is the weapon of the few, then numbers are the weapon of the many. Sometimes that organization takes the form of socialism, sometimes populism, and sometimes—tragically—fascism.
This last possibility is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a historical pattern. When elites delegitimize collective economic organizing—when they paint unions as thuggish, redistribution as theft, and solidarity as naïve—they don’t eliminate people’s rage at economic injustice. They simply force it to find other channels. And those channels are often darker: scapegoating, nationalism, the worship of strongmen who promise to restore lost dignity through dominance rather than justice. Fascism has always fed on economic humiliation combined with the blocking of economic solutions. The billionaire class, by hoarding power while condemning those who organize to reclaim it, creates the very conditions in which fascism becomes seductive. They build the kindling and then express shock when someone strikes a match.
But in every case—socialism, populism, fascism—the motive is the same: to redress an imbalance of power that polite ideology refuses to name. And here is where the masses are not just tactically justified but morally justified in their organizing. They are not the aggressors. They did not break the social contract first. The billionaire class rigged the system, captured the gains, and then told everyone else to be patient, to trust the process, to play by rules that were designed to ensure their loss. When the masses organize in response, they are not initiating violence against a neutral order—they are responding to a violence already committed against them. The billionaires broke the arrangement; the masses are simply acknowledging that it’s broken.
This is dangerous terrain. Once we accept that all politics is simply power dressed as principle, we lose the grounds to criticize any movement except on the basis of whose power we prefer. That is a coherent position, but it is also a bleak one—and it risks undermining any normative claim we might want to make about justice, fairness, or democracy itself. If ideals are only decorations, then every political vision becomes morally equivalent, distinguished only by who wields it.
But I do not believe that. I am not arguing from cynicism. I am arguing from a position outside this binary.
I am a Muslim, and my framework is justice—a principle that stands above both capitalism and socialism. Islam teaches that I am obligated to uphold justice even if it goes against my own benefit. This is not optional; it is commanded. And from that vantage point, I can see clearly that the billionaire class is being dishonest when they dress up self-interest as universal principle.
Islam offers a holistic view of the human being: not as a unit of production to be optimized and discarded, not as an abstract bearer of rights, but as a creature with dignity, responsibility, and limits. Both capitalism and socialism, in their purest forms, can become mechanistic—almost autistic in their way of looking at the world. (I use the term descriptively, not as an insult: systems that hyper-focus on a single logic at the cost of seeing the whole, much as some autistic individuals possess exceptional focus in one domain while finding holistic integration challenging. This is meant as a clinical observation about systems, not a judgment of people.) Capitalism reduces people to profit margins; socialism can reduce them to statistics in a planned economy. Both can become idolatrous when they elevate their own logic above the dignity of human life.
What does dignity actually require? It is not simply a feeling or an aspiration—it has material prerequisites. A person cannot live with dignity if they lack food, shelter, or security. This establishes a floor: any economic system that leaves people below this threshold has failed, regardless of its efficiency or theoretical elegance. But dignity also requires a ceiling. Grotesque concentrations of wealth are not simply unfair—they are incompatible with a society of equals. When one person commands resources equivalent to the lifetime labor of millions, they are no longer a citizen among citizens. They become a power unto themselves, and everyone else becomes subject to their whims. Dignity, then, demands both a guaranteed minimum and a reasonable maximum.
But dignity requires more than material sufficiency. It requires meaningful work—labor that contributes to something larger than mere survival, that allows a person to see themselves as part of a community rather than a cog in a machine. It requires participation—the ability to have a voice in decisions that affect one’s life. And it requires limits—boundaries that prevent the endless expansion of desires, the reduction of all relationships to transactions, the colonization of every hour by market logic. Islamic economics is not “capitalism with charity.” It is a different theory of what humans need to flourish: not maximum consumption or perfect equality, but balance, purpose, and accountability to something beyond the self.
I am not pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist. I am not pro-socialist or anti-socialist. I am pro-justice, and I follow the economic teachings of Islam, which seek a balanced path—not a midpoint between capitalism and socialism, but a different way entirely, one that honors the full humanity of every person.
Islamic economics is built on concrete mechanisms, not vague principles. Consider the prohibition of riba—usury, or interest-based lending. This is not simply a ritual rule. It is a structural intervention. Interest allows wealth to grow without labor, without risk, without contributing anything real to the economy. It is the purest form of extraction: money making money, detached from production or service. Riba creates a class of people whose wealth compounds automatically while others must labor just to pay the interest on their debts. It is a machine for concentrating wealth, and Islam forbids it.
In its place, Islamic finance uses risk-sharing contracts. If you want to fund a business, you become a partner—you share in the profits if it succeeds, and you share in the losses if it fails. This aligns incentives. It ensures that capital serves enterprise rather than dominating it. It prevents the creation of a permanent creditor class that profits regardless of outcomes while debtors bear all the risk.
Then there is zakat—mandatory almsgiving. This is not charity in the Western sense, something voluntary and praiseworthy. It is an obligation, a wealth tax of 2.5 percent on assets held beyond a threshold. Zakat is owed to the poor, to those in debt, to travelers in need, to those working for the common good. It is a recognition that wealth circulates through a community, that no one’s prosperity is entirely their own doing, and that those who have been blessed with abundance have a duty to those who have not. Unlike modern taxation, which can feel punitive or arbitrary, zakat is framed as purification—a way of cleansing wealth, ensuring it does not become hoarded or corrupting.
Islamic law also includes protections for the vulnerable: prohibitions against price gouging, requirements to honor contracts, restrictions on speculative trading that destabilizes markets for essential goods. There are rules limiting land ownership if the land is left unused—wealth cannot simply sit idle while others go without. There are inheritance laws designed to prevent dynastic accumulation, distributing estates across families rather than concentrating them in a single heir.
This is not utopian. It is structural. It is a system designed to prevent the conditions that make billionaires possible. Not through revolution or confiscation, but through rules that embed justice into the architecture of economic life.
Now, the obvious objection: if Islamic economics is so sound, why don’t Muslim-majority countries exemplify it? Why do we see massive inequality in Saudi Arabia, injustice in Pakistan, corruption across the Muslim world? If the principles are so robust, shouldn’t they produce better results where they’ve supposedly been implemented?
The answer is straightforward: Muslims have not always been the best implementers of Islamic ideals. This is not a new problem. Islam has taught from the beginning that if you own a slave, the best course is to free them—your reward in the hereafter would be manifold. Many Muslims followed this principle and freed their slaves. But just as many kept slaves. Worse, some Muslims after wars chose to enslave their opponents as the “lesser evil” to killing them—yet the result was that slavery remained alive in Muslim-majority countries, sustained by Muslims who found ways to circumvent or ignore the guidelines of their own faith.
So pointing to Muslim-majority countries and declaring that Islamic economics has failed is to make a simplistic argument: that those who propose a solution must first demonstrate that the solution works before it can be implemented. But this is a chicken-and-egg fallacy. It assumes that failure to implement proves the principle is flawed, rather than proving that implementation is difficult. By this logic, we should abandon democracy because so many democracies are corrupt, or reject human rights because so many nations violate them.
What I am proposing is not that we look to existing Muslim states as models. I am proposing that we use the ground principle of justice—holding justice before your own benefit—as the foundational rule for everything else. Every economic rule I have mentioned in this essay flows from that basic principle. And here is the irony: in the West, there is this fantasy, this irrational fear, that Muslims will take over and impose Sharia law. Yet many of these laws are objectively good for all human beings, not just Muslims. It has been proven, even by non-Islamic societies, that rent-seeking behavior is bad for economics and bad for the social fabric of society. So when Islam says no riba, no rent-seeking, no interest, it is not for Muslims alone—it is a universal good. The prohibition is grounded in what works, not in sectarian dogma.
My moral position in this essay is quite abstract, and there is a good reason for that. This essay is about justice. The idea of justice must be at the forefront of our actions. I have concrete ideas about how we should shape our future, but I do not want those ideas to dominate this essay, because I recognize that others may have different ways of seeing justice implemented. I have seen what happens when a singular vision is imposed: tyrannical socialist governments crushing dissent in the name of equality, fascist capitalist nationalist systems brutalizing populations in the name of order. What I want is true justice with dignity for all—not for the few, not for a new elite that replaces an old elite and calls it a day. Justice for the individual, rooted in principles that transcend the systems we build.
That said, if you ask me how I would implement Islamic principles of justice in the modern world, I have written elsewhere about an idea I call Universal Ownership. It is positioned in contrast to Universal Basic Income, which I was once a proponent of but have since rejected. UBI, I am now convinced, will cause massive centralization and will likely do more harm than good in the long run. It funnels enormous amounts of money to governments, and governments are, in many aspects, very bad at managing other people’s money. Public funds create a problem: you end up with central figures controlling the economy, which is just a replacement of the billionaire elite with a bureaucratic elite.
Universal Ownership takes a different approach. It borrows principles from patent law. With the coming AI, automation, and robotics revolution, we need a way to prevent an already bad situation from becoming even worse—where an even smaller group of people hoards all the wealth. We need a new social contract. Here is how it works: we harness the power of capitalism to create mass products and services. If you are an entrepreneur, you have twenty years to make all the money you can from your idea, your product, or your service. But after twenty years—counted from the moment your business is 90 percent automated, running on AI and robotics—you enter a new phase.
During those twenty years, there is no taxation on your business. Everything you make, every margin you create in the market, is completely yours. You pay no taxes. But after twenty years, that almost fully automated company, which you have been profiting from, goes into the public domain. The robots continue to run the same product lines, the same services, for the same markets—but now with dispersed ownership. We use blockchain technology to identify the citizens of the region where the product or service is provided, and we give ownership of the company to every citizen in that region. Every citizen receives dividends annually or quarterly, just as current stockholders do.
Capitalism still has a chance in this system. Entrepreneurs still have enormous incentive to build and innovate. But there is a social justice aspect, an Islamic aspect, where people do not hoard unlimited capital from generation to generation. There is an elegant cap: after twenty years of making money without paying taxes, you keep your wealth, but the company enters public ownership. In this system, you get a better distribution of ownership. It becomes much harder to become a billionaire—you can still become very wealthy, but you must really work. You cannot rent-seek. You must build things that are productive and constructive. And the beauty of it is that we don’t need massive government investment and taxation for all sorts of social programs that are merely patching the bad side of capitalism. This is my implementation of what it means to be just.
But I do not insist on this vision. What I insist on is the principle: that justice must come first, that dignity must be defended, and that we must be honest about the power dynamics that shape our world.
And from that position, I can see the hypocrisy clearly. The billionaire class has shaped the world to benefit themselves. They have leveraged money and power to rig the rules in their favor. This is not an abstract claim. It is a documented history, one that begins in the 1970s and continues to this day.
For roughly three decades after World War II, productivity and wages in the United States rose together. Workers shared in the prosperity they helped create. Then, beginning in the 1970s, the two lines diverged. Productivity continued to climb—workers produced more, generated more value—but wages stagnated. The wealth created by that increased productivity flowed upward, concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.
What happened? Several things, all connected. The Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971, unmooring currencies from fixed exchange rates and enabling a new era of financial speculation. Union membership began a steep decline, undermined by policy changes and aggressive corporate opposition. Tax rates on the wealthy were slashed—the top marginal rate, which had been over 70 percent, fell to less than 40 percent. Financial deregulation accelerated, allowing banks to grow enormous and engage in riskier and riskier behavior. Shareholder primacy became the dominant corporate philosophy, prioritizing short-term stock prices over long-term stability or worker welfare. Globalization intensified, allowing capital to flow freely across borders while labor remained bound by geography, giving corporations leverage to demand concessions by threatening to move jobs overseas.
These were not natural developments. They were policy choices, advocated by those who stood to benefit and imposed on everyone else. The result was predictable: wealth concentrated, power concentrated, and the majority saw their share of the economic pie shrink even as the pie itself grew larger.
And all the while, the masses have been told the same story: trust the market, trust us, your life will get better. Decade after decade, the same song. And decade after decade, for most people, life has not gotten better.
Now, when the masses organize—when they use the only power they have, which is numbers—the billionaires are aghast. They cry that socialism will take things away from them. But this is a reversal of the truth. They have already taken the productivity, the wealth, the future—and now they balk at the suggestion that a two percent tax might fund childcare. It is absurd. It is laughable.
The socialist diagnosis may be correct: a system that produces billionaires is a system that has failed. If justice were built into the structure, it would not be possible to accumulate such grotesque wealth while others go without. But I also believe the socialist prescription—centralized control, redistribution by force—is a reaction, not a solution. It is born from the wound capitalism inflicts, but it does not heal the wound. It simply tries to reverse the imbalance using the same mechanistic thinking that created it.
Islam offers something else: rules that prevent exploitation without reducing humans to cogs. Limits on interest, obligations of charity, protections for the vulnerable, respect for property paired with responsibility to the community. It is not capitalism. It is not socialism. It is a third way, grounded in the belief that economic life must serve human dignity, not the other way around.
So the argument of the billionaires is hollow. Not because markets are evil or socialism is pure, but because the argument itself is dishonest. It pretends to be about ideals, when it is only about control. Ideals are the garnish. Power is the meal.
But I refuse to accept that this is all politics can be. I refuse to accept that we must choose between the oligarchy of the few and the tyranny of the masses, between market fundamentalism and state control, between cynicism and naivety. There is another way—a way that begins not with systems, but with principles. With justice. With the recognition that every human being has worth that cannot be reduced to utility or ideology.
And perhaps that is the truth modern democracy keeps trying not to face—that our age is not a contest of ideas, but a negotiation of power. And the banners we wave, red or blue, left or right, are often just decorations on the same ancient struggle: who rules whom.
But it does not have to be this way. If we are willing to name the hypocrisy, to see through the false flags, and to stand on principles that transcend the power games—then perhaps we can imagine something better than the endless oscillation between exploitation and reaction.
That is what I see when I watch the billionaires condemn socialism while hoarding power. Not a defense of freedom, but a defense of control. Not a principled stand, but a self-interested one. And I will not pretend otherwise, because my faith demands that I call injustice by its name—even when it is dressed in the language of markets, efficiency, and prosperity.
The flags may change. The struggle remains. But the obligation to justice does not waver.
Khadim Zaman's Blog 