The brand-new Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream is weirdly evasive about capitalism’s messy entanglement with the state. One might have expected that topic to come up, given the museum’s location: It’s a $500 million shrine to capitalism directly across the street from the White House, in what used to be Riggs Bank, a financial institution brought down by accusations of money laundering and other regulatory violations.
That evasiveness is especially striking given the founder’s own biography: a financier whose “junk bonds” helped fuel massive economic change, who was then prosecuted and punished before being pardoned by a populist president. There are plenty of inspiring tales of entrepreneurship and grit on display in the glossy, gorgeous displays. There’s a much more interesting, complicated story about capitalism hiding in Michael Milken’s arc alone, but the museum mostly sidesteps it.
