Research & Insights

What Conservatives once knew about concentrated wealth and power

Concerns about corporate concentration and political risk aren't new. In this piece, Tom Powdrill traces a striking 1947 passage from Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), shaped by the trauma of Nazism, warning that monopolistic companies can "jeopardize freedom in the state" and calling for antitrust action, ownership caps, and worker codetermination. Nearly 80 years later, as ownership and control concentrate again, the CDU's postwar diagnosis reads as remarkably prescient. A short, sharp reminder that predistributive thinking has deep roots across the political spectrum.