Over three score years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower had a warning for America.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address as president. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

“We must never let the weight of this combination,” Ike continued, “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Eisenhower’s warning would, sadly, go almost totally unheeded. In the years since Ike’s farewell, the “military-industrial complex” he so feared has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.

Earlier this week, in his own farewell address, President Joe Biden gave that concentration a grim label.

An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

We now face, Biden added, a “dangerous concentration of........

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