Noblesse Oblige, A Primer

The Walton family is worth $354 billion.^[1] Seven heirs to Sam Walton's retail empire appear on the 2024 Forbes 400. They own roughly half of Walmart's shares.

Walmart consistently ranks among the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid recipients in every state that tracks such data. As of the most recent GAO analysis in 2020, nearly 4,000 Walmart workers in Georgia alone relied on taxpayer-funded healthcare.^[2] Americans for Tax Fairness estimates the public subsidizes Walmart's wage bill at $6.2 billion annually.^[3] That money flows through workers' EBT cards and right back into Walmart's registers, where the company captures 18% of all SNAP spending nationwide.

How did we build systems where this outcome is legal, predictable, and perfectly rational?

The principle appears across cultures and centuries, arrived at independently: power obligates.

Luke 12:48 states it directly. "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."

Islam's zakat makes it structural, not aspirational. The third of the Five Pillars requires Muslims holding wealth above the nisab threshold to give 2.5% annually.

China's Mandate of Heaven added enforcement. The Qin Dynasty conscripted millions to build the Great Wall, burned texts that challenged state authority, and taxed peasants into starvation. Four years after its founder's death, it collapsed. The diagnosis: Heaven had withdrawn its blessing from rulers who abandoned their duties.^[4]

Feudal Europe encoded similar expectations. Lords owed military protection, famine relief, infrastructure, justice. These were conditions of the arrangement, not acts of generosity.

The insight recurs.

Democratic governance was supposed to replace feudal obligation with citizen accountability. Educated citizens, armed with information and voting rights, would check concentrated power through institutions. Education, Liberty, and Democracy explores this framework.

Democratic accountability requires informed citizens capable of recognizing when power violates its obligations. Each of the following developments weakened a different part of that mechanism.

Regulatory capture put industry insiders in charge of oversight. Scott Gottlieb left as FDA Commissioner and joined Pfizer's board 85 days later.^[5] Goldman Sachs executives have rotated through Treasury across administrations.^[6] Citizens United v. FEC (2010) formalized money as speech, flooding elections with unaccountable funding. Dark money grew from under $5 million annually before the ruling to $1.9 billion by 2024. The top 1% of Super PAC donors provide 96% of Super PAC funding.^[7] And the education vertex eroded. Citizens can't recognize violations of obligations they were never taught existed.

Into this vacuum, an ideology emerged that reframed the ancient bargain as a threat.

The seeds were planted in 1919. In Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., Henry Ford announced he'd reinvest profits into lower prices and more jobs rather than pay special dividends. Minority shareholders sued. The Michigan Supreme Court ordered the dividend paid, writing that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders."^[8]

Cornell's Lynn Stout later argued this passage was dicta, not binding precedent.^[9] But the language provided rhetorical scaffolding for what came next.

On September 13, 1970, the New York Times Magazine published Milton Friedman's "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits."^[10] Friedman wrote: "There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game."

The article was prescription, not description. Executives embracing broader social responsibility were, in his framing, "unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society." The obligation that every major civilization had recognized as essential to legitimate power was recast as socialism by another name.

The results showed up in compensation data. In 1965, CEOs earned roughly 20 times what typical workers made. By 2021, the ratio peaked at 405-to-1. From 1978 to 2023, CEO compensation grew 1,085% while typical worker pay increased 24%.^[11] Productivity rose 59.7% from 1979 to 2019. Median compensation grew 15.8%.^[12] Workers produced more. They received less. The difference went to shareholders and executives.

Alec Raeshawn Smith was 26 years old when he died of diabetic ketoacidosis in Minneapolis on June 27, 2017.^[13] He had aged off his mother's insurance exactly 27 days earlier, on his birthday. He earned $35,000 a year managing a restaurant. Available insurance plans carried $450 monthly premiums with $7,600 deductibles. His insulin cost $1,300 a month without coverage. He died three days before payday. His insulin pen was empty.

This is what systems optimized for extraction produce.

Three companies control 99% of the insulin market: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. In May 2014, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk each raised prices by 16.1% within one day of each other. Six months later, both raised prices by 11.9%.^[14] Eli Lilly's Humalog cost $21 per vial at launch in 1996. By 2019, it cost $275. Production costs remain $2-4 per vial.^[15] T1International documented at least 14 Americans who died rationing insulin between 2017 and 2019. One in four Americans with Type 1 diabetes reported rationing due to cost.^[16]

The executives setting these prices operate within the framework Friedman prescribed, fulfilling fiduciary duties as American corporate law has come to define them.

When obligation lacks structural enforcement, it erodes. The Social Contract, Explained examines how implicit agreements fail without mechanisms to back them.

Walmart will not voluntarily pay wages that eliminate public assistance dependency. Doing so would arguably violate fiduciary duty. Insulin manufacturers will not voluntarily price for access. Their legal obligation runs to investors.

Building systems where reciprocity is structural, encoded in rules rather than dependent on virtue, requires different architecture entirely. The Future Is Branded MUNNY explores what that might look like.

Greed is constant. What changes is whether systems channel it toward mutual benefit or extraction.