Month: December 2025

You’ve heard it: “Capitalism can’t be reformed.” It sounds principled. Who wants to collaborate with an exploitative system?

Here’s what’s actually happening: that position is strategic paralysis. While you debate revolutionary purity, concentrated wealth consolidates control through the democratic institutions you’ve abandoned.

In this essay, I expose how far-left arguments function:

– The structural absolutism declaring all reform as futile or collaboration
– How these positions share the same economic myths as the far-right
– Why retreat from federal power serves concentrated wealth perfectly
– How purity politics fragments coalitions while oligarchs consolidate unopposed
– Response templates for building effective coalitions despite these arguments

The evidence is clear: the New Deal, Scandinavian social democracy, and the GI Bill demonstrate democratic reform works. Denmark’s stronger safety net enables 30% higher business formation than the U.S. Institutional quality matters more than ideological purity.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series defending democratic capitalism from extremist attacks. Part 1 examined far-right libertarian positions. Part 3 will make the positive case for public money as democratic tool.

You’ve heard it: “Taxation is theft.” Maybe from a libertarian uncle, maybe from a podcast, maybe in online debates. It sounds principled.
Who likes being forced to pay for things they don’t support?

Here’s what’s actually happening: that phrase is a weapon. A corporate-funded weapon designed to eliminate the only tool (democratic government) capable of constraining concentrated wealth.

For fifty years, far-right rhetoric has been dismantling democratic capitalism. Every time someone says “taxation is theft,” they’re attacking the legitimacy of democratic collective action itself. When all collective action becomes “violence,” oligarchs operate without democratic accountability.

In this essay, I expose how these arguments actually work:

– The core philosophical contradiction that makes libertarian framework self-defeating
– The corporate funding behind these arguments (billions invested since the 1940s)
– Six rhetorical techniques designed to manipulate you into accepting oligarchy
– Five economic myths exploited to make collective action seem impossible
– Specific response templates for defending democratic capitalism in real conversations

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 examines far-left constraints on democratic capitalism. Part 3 makes the positive case for public money as the tool enabling broad prosperity.

Obamacare achieved what it was designed to do: expand insurance coverage. But it was never designed to succeed at healthcare, and it never could have been. Two interlocking mythologies constrain American healthcare imagination: an economic mythology that makes fiscal limits appear natural, and a political mythology that makes universal programs appear ideologically dangerous. Together they create intellectual gridlock where voters cannot demand what they cannot imagine, and politicians cannot offer what voters will not accept. This essay deconstructs both mythologies piece by piece, revealing how Obamacare’s specific design choices were inevitable given the framework, and how the same framework constrains both parties. Once you see how the mythology works, you can break free from it and finally demand better.

In January 1946, Federal Reserve Chairman Beardsley Ruml published an article explaining that the federal government doesn’t need tax revenue to fund its spending. He was describing the actual mechanics of sovereign currency systems after leaving the gold standard. We spent 80 years forgetting what he told us, and it’s time to remember.