Explaining How America’s Fifty-Year-Old System of ‘Socialism for the Wealthy’ Works

How a Deliberately Built System Operates Against Ordinary Americans, and How They Can Reengineer It to Serve Them

The popular framing of socialism is simple: taxpayer money (treated as scarce and as confiscations of other people’s wealth) is redistributed to people who didn’t work for money. Money in this view carries a moral charge. Money is property. Work is moral. Markets are the moral way to acquire money.

This view rests on zero-sum thinking. The popular framing treats federal money like household money: there is a fixed pool that comes from taxpayers, and every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken from people who earned it. Spending on the undeserving is waste. It all collapses into a slogan: market transactions good, government disbursements bad. Government disbursements are socialism.

Strip away the moral framing. The popular definition of socialism comes down to a single question: is the government using public resources to enrich a particular group through political decisions instead of market activity? By that test, what this essay describes is socialism. The group being enriched is the asset-holder class (the people who own most of the wealth), not ordinary Americans. The right uses this same test to attack public investment in housing, healthcare, education, and income support. Apply the test honestly to what the United States has actually been doing since 1971, and it lands on the asset-holder class. The result is what this essay calls “Socialism for the Wealthy.” Naming the system precisely is what makes reengineering it possible.

This is not about households that own a home, have a 401k, or have built modest savings through regular work. The recipient class is the ultra-wealthy and the billionaire class. These are households whose wealth has gotten so large it can warp the political and economic systems of the country. Think the top 0.1% and the top 0.01%, where the only thing the holders can do with their wealth is use it to shape political, regulatory, and election outcomes in their own favor. The middle class is not the recipient class of socialism for the wealthy. Even most of the top 10% are not the recipient class. The recipient class is the small group of asset holders so wealthy that their interests have become baked into the design of the system itself. When this essay says “the wealthy” or “the asset-holder class,” that is who is being named.

Socialism for the wealthy is not one thing. It runs through monetary policy, tax law, regulations, trade agreements, the collapse of antitrust enforcement, the capture of publicly funded research, and procedural shortcuts that let government act before the public can weigh in. No single mechanism does the work. The wealth concentration this essay describes happens because all of these mechanisms reinforce each other over decades. Each of them uses the same set of myths in two different ways: applied strictly to ordinary Americans when they ask for public spending, and quietly waived for the asset-holder class when their interests are at stake. Bank bailouts get called “emergency response.” Corporate tax cuts get called “pro-growth.” Quantitative easing gets called “monetary policy.” That selective use of the myths is the wealth transfer. The complexity is not essay sprawl. The complexity is the point. This is not a one-time policy. It is a system of continuous wealth transfer that runs decade after decade.

The change that made Socialism for the Wealthy possible came in 1971, when the U.S. dollar stopped being convertible to gold. Before 1971, every dollar the government created had to be backed by physical gold in storage. After 1971, dollars stopped being tied to any physical commodity. That switch removed the real limit on federal spending. The government could now create dollars at any scale political will allowed. But the story the public was told stayed the same. The household-budget version (the government has a fixed amount of money, can run out, must live within its means) had described a real limit before 1971. After 1971, it became a story told to everyone except the asset-holder class. The new mechanics were not a secret. Abba Lerner described how the system actually worked in 1943. Beardsley Ruml, the chairman of the New York Fed, told the American Bar Association in 1945 that federal taxes do not fund federal spending. (You’ll see that quote again later in this essay.) Generations of economists carried the line through the decades that followed and extended it further (Hyman Minsky, Joan Robinson, Paul Davidson among them).

The political and economic establishment knew how the new system actually worked. They did not announce it. They quietly pushed the economists who taught the real mechanics to the academic margins, used those mechanics for themselves, and kept telling the public the old story was still true. The gap between what is actually possible and what ordinary Americans are told is possible is where socialism for the wealthy lives. Some of the mechanisms below predate the 1971 turn (depreciation rules baked into ordinary tax law). But the biggest ones (trillion-dollar quantitative easing programs, the bailout machinery, the corporate stock-buyback regime) only became possible because of what changed in 1971.

My position in this essay is not anti-wealth-building. The Opportunity Economics framework I argue for elsewhere holds the opposite: wealth-building should be open to everyone, and the system works better when it is. Competition is good when it is fair, when everyone gets a real chance, and when no one is rigging it. Competition turns harmful when it becomes extractive, exploitative, or rigged through bigotry. That kind of competition doesn’t lift anyone up; it just entrenches the asset-holder class. Wealth that comes from creating real value in fair competition is exactly what a healthy economy produces, and what Opportunity Economics aims to make available to everyone. The wealth this essay describes is something different. It is wealth captured through arrangements built on public resources that ordinary Americans are systematically blocked from using for themselves. This essay is the diagnosis. The alternative, where the same public resources support ordinary Americans rather than the asset-holder class, is what I argue for in UBI vs UBA and Capacity Stewardship.

Who Actually Owns the Assets?

Start with the basic question of who benefits when financial assets go up. The introduction named the recipient class conceptually (top 0.1% and 0.01%); the Federal Reserve data confirms it.

The top 10% of U.S. households own roughly 93% of all household stock market wealth. The top 1% alone owns about 54%. The bottom half of all American households owns less than half a trillion dollars in stock market wealth in a market valued at around $55 trillion as of 2025. These are Federal Reserve numbers, not progressive talking points.

Yes, about 62% of Americans hold some stocks, mostly through retirement accounts. That fact gets used to suggest the stock market is something most Americans benefit from. It isn’t. The story isn’t whether ordinary people own any stocks. The story is who owns enough stocks for it to matter. By that measure, the stock market is a wealth concentrator: a lot of Americans hold a tiny share each, and a tiny share of Americans hold most of it.

The trend matters as much as the snapshot. As I documented in Why Economic Models Matter, the top 1% wealth share has grown from roughly 23% in 1979 to over 32% in the 2020s (Saez-Zucman estimates). The top 0.1% captured a wildly disproportionate share of the gains after the 2008 financial crisis. This is not a stable inequality number. This is fifty years of continuous concentration, with each policy change pushing more wealth further up.

Wage earners had the opposite experience. From 1979 to 2019, productivity grew about 60% while typical hourly pay grew only 16% (Economic Policy Institute data, also covered in Federal Taxes Don’t Fund the Government). Workers produced the value. The asset-holding class captured it. That gap is the fingerprint of an economy that has been financialized (rewards tied to owning assets rather than to doing productive work). The rest of this essay walks through how the gap was produced.

The composition of the asset-holding class has also shifted in stages. As I traced in 50 Years of Economic Myths Have Delivered Americans Into Technofeudalism, the dominant elite was industrial in the 1980s, financial through the 1990s and 2000s, and tech-and-finance from roughly 2010 onward. Different industries, same recipient class, same fifty-year wealth-concentration project.

So when financial commentators celebrate that “the market” is up, they are reporting that the top 10% got richer. Any policy or action that systematically pushes up stock prices is, by definition, a transfer of wealth toward that group.

The current moment makes this visible. Through 2025 and into 2026, ordinary Americans have been experiencing layoffs, a softening labor market, and inflation that policy is actively producing through tariff and immigration shocks. At the same time, the Trump administration is claiming the economy is booming and pointing at a record-setting stock market as the proof. Both can be true simultaneously, and the reason explains the trick. The stock market is a capital sink: a place where excess capital in the system goes to inflate prices, not a barometer of the productive economy. The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act added enormous federal spending to the existing deficit, which sent more Treasury issuance into the financial system and routed more interest income to the asset-holder class, which then flowed back into stocks.

The trading mechanics inside the sink make the concentration worse. Momentum trading (buying what is already rising and selling what is already falling) and dip buying (buying every price decline on the assumption the Fed will rescue, a pattern trained into the market by every QE intervention since 2008) push capital toward whatever the largest players are already accumulating. Pump-and-dump dynamics, where coordinated buying drives prices up before insiders sell to the retail crowd that arrived late, have become increasingly prevalent through social-media coordination, options-driven price squeezes, and concentrated whale positioning. The mechanism is the same in each case: large players move first, smaller traders chase, and the gains flow upward. The market today functions less as a system for honestly pricing the productive economy and more as a casino in which the largest players consistently clip the smaller traders who arrive after the move. The concentration makes this more extreme. As of 2024-2025, the top ten stocks in the S&P 500 (mostly consumer-recognizable brands like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla, the so-called “Magnificent Seven”) accounted for roughly 35 percent of the index’s total market capitalization, an all-time concentration high. When financial commentators celebrate that “the market” is up, they are usually celebrating that a handful of mega-cap stocks favored by the largest trading players went up.

The mechanism is explained more fully later in this essay. The point here is that the market and the economy are no longer the same thing. The stock market going up is no longer evidence that Americans are getting wealthier.

These are the wealthy in “Socialism for the Wealthy.” Once you see who owns the assets, the next question is who decided to inflate them, and with whose money.

What Mechanism Makes This Possible? The Soft-Money Tool

Most Americans still don’t realize the next part.

After 1971, the U.S. dollar stopped being convertible to gold. The country moved from a hard-money system (dollars backed by physical gold) to a soft-money system (dollars not backed by any physical commodity). How many dollars exist is no longer pinned to how much gold is in storage. It is a policy choice made by the Federal Reserve and Congress in combination. In this system, federal money is not private property in the way the popular framing assumes. It is a public institution: a resource created and managed by the government to enable economic activity.

This is not theory. This is how the system actually works. As I explained in Federal Taxes Don’t Fund the Government and Why Monetary Systems Matter, the federal government is a currency issuer, not a currency user. It does not “run out” of money. It creates dollars by crediting bank accounts. Federal taxes do other important things (controlling inflation, redistributing income, creating demand for the dollar), but they are not the source of the money the federal government spends. An economist writing in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Regional Economist stated this plainly: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent.” Then-Federal-Reserve-Chairman Alan Greenspan made the same operational point in 1997 testimony, observing that because U.S. debt is denominated in dollars the federal government cannot default on its obligations in the way a private borrower can. Ben Bernanke, defending crisis-era Fed action on 60 Minutes in 2009, put it more directly: “It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed… we credit those accounts. So it’s much more akin to printing money than borrowing.” Jerome Powell, asked about Federal Reserve capacity during the COVID crisis on 60 Minutes in March 2020, said: “There’s an infinite amount of cash in the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure there’s enough cash in the banking system.” Three Federal Reserve Chairs, three decades, three crises, the same operational point. The Bank of England documented the same mechanics in its 2014 paper on money creation in the modern economy.

The constraint on federal spending is not arithmetic. The constraint is real resources (labor, materials, energy, productive capacity) and inflation (what happens when too many dollars chase too few goods). Beardsley Ruml, the chairman of the New York Fed, told the American Bar Association this in 1945. We’ve spent eighty years pretending otherwise. The distinction matters because the rules describing who is in charge of what are not the same as how dollars actually get created. I work through this distinction in Why Economic Models Matter. Confusing the two is how the mythology survives.

The part that matters for “Socialism for the Wealthy”:

The soft-money tool is neutral. The question is always: in whose direction is it pointed?

A natural reaction to this diagnosis is to want to abolish fiat. That instinct gets the problem backwards. A return to hard money does not solve socialism for the wealthy. It hands the money-creation monopoly back to whoever holds the physical commodity, which was a small concentrated class then and would be again now. The reason fiat is the most powerful tool for democratic capitalism is precisely that no one holds a monopoly on the commodity. Money creation becomes a public institution under political control. That is what makes democratic redirection possible at all. The diagnosis in this essay is not that fiat enables socialism for the wealthy. The diagnosis is that the public has allowed the asset-holder class to direct the public’s tool against the public. Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship makes the full case for fiat as the democratic instrument.

In principle, the federal government could use this tool to eliminate child poverty, build infrastructure, fund a green transition, guarantee a job at a living wage, or directly provide the things ordinary people need to live. That’s the framework I lay out in UBI vs. UBA and Opportunity Economics.

In practice, for fifty years, we have pointed the tool in one direction. Where it has been pointed is what “Socialism for the Wealthy” refers to. The next section catalogs the specific deployments.

How the Tool Has Been Deployed: Five Monetary Mechanisms

Look at the receipts. Five mechanisms, in roughly the order they were stacked.

Depreciation Rules. The least-discussed mechanism is also the longest-running. Federal tax law permits businesses to write off depreciation (the gradual loss of value as equipment wears out) on capital equipment they own. Ordinary households cannot write off the same kind of wear on the cars, appliances, and electronics they own and replace. As I detailed in How Corporate-Friendly Accounting Rules Create a $30 Trillion Transfer from Consumers into Wealthy Pockets, the difference is not an accounting curiosity. It is an ongoing wealth transfer baked into ordinary tax law. Wealthy asset holders get an annual public subsidy on the wear of their productive assets. Wage earners get nothing on the wear of their household assets, while paying the higher prices that forced replacement creates. By the right’s own definition of socialism, applied consistently, this is socialism for asset holders. It also predates quantitative easing by decades, which is why “Socialism for the Wealthy” is not a 2008 phenomenon. The architecture was already in place long before the bailouts.

Stock Buybacks. During the 2010s alone, U.S. publicly listed companies spent approximately $6.3 trillion buying back their own shares. S&P 500 buybacks reached a record approximately $943 billion in 2024 and continued near $1 trillion in 2025. A buyback is a way for a company to convert its cash into a higher share price (when a company buys back its own stock, each remaining share represents a bigger slice of the company). Buybacks directly inflate the wealth of existing shareholders, who are concentrated at the top. They were largely illegal as market manipulation until the SEC adopted Rule 10b-18 in 1982, creating a safe harbor that has redirected trillions of dollars away from wages, R&D, and capital investment, and into the share prices held by the asset-holder class. This is not a market outcome. It is a regulatory choice with a predictable winner.

The Bailouts. In 2008, the federal government and Federal Reserve mobilized somewhere between $700 billion (TARP alone) and several trillion dollars (counting Fed emergency lending facilities) to prevent the collapse of banks and other financial institutions. In 2020, a similar but larger response prevented the COVID-induced market collapse from compounding. In 2023, the FDIC effectively guaranteed all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, including the uninsured ones held by venture-capital-backed firms, in a matter of days.

Quantitative Easing. Between 2008 and 2022, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet expanded from roughly $800 billion to nearly $9 trillion. That is more than $8 trillion in newly created money, used overwhelmingly to buy Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities from banks and financial institutions. The official theory was that this would lower long-term interest rates and stimulate the economy. The actual mechanism, well understood by central bankers, was the “wealth effect”: push down bond yields, push investors into riskier assets like stocks, push asset prices up, and hope some of it trickles down. It worked exactly as designed for the asset-holding class. It did not work for everyone else. Wages grew sluggishly through most of the 2010s while stock indexes tripled. Real median household income grew by a fraction of that. The wealth effect was, in practice, a wealth concentration effect.

Interest on Excess Reserves. Less visible but important. Beginning in 2008, the Federal Reserve started paying banks interest on the reserves they hold at the Fed rather than lend out. The program is known as Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER), later restructured but continuing in similar form. The effect is straightforward: the Fed pays banks for not lending. Money flows from the Fed (a public account) to commercial banks (private accounts) without any productive activity in exchange. The amounts are not trivial. With trillions of dollars in reserves earning interest, the program has transferred billions per year from the public to the largest banks. Like quantitative easing, this is a public money-creation tool pointed in one direction. It is a quiet, technical mechanism that absorbs public money into private financial institutions, defended as “monetary-policy plumbing” rather than discussed as the upward transfer it actually is.

In none of these cases was anyone seriously asked, “How will we pay for it?” The soft-money tool was simply used. The decision was made. The asset class was protected.

Compare that to how the same tool gets discussed when ordinary people are the proposed beneficiaries. Cancel student debt? “How will we pay for it?” Universal pre-K? “How will we pay for it?” Medicare for All? “How will we pay for it?” Build public housing at scale? “How will we pay for it?” The question that never gets asked when banks need rescuing is the only question that gets asked when working people need help.

This is the trick. This is the entire trick.

How the Mechanism Is Reinforced Beyond Money: The Policy Stack

The monetary mechanisms above did not act alone. They were backed by a matching set of policies across labor, trade, regulation, and tax law that weakened workers’ ability to negotiate while making it easier for asset holders to capture the gains. As I argued in The Opportunity Economy Toolkit, most federal spending growth over the last fifty years went to defense and security rather than to social support. Meanwhile corporate advantages expanded dramatically through tax-code changes favoring asset owners, trade policies enabling offshoring, and financial deregulation that privatized gains while socializing losses. We have had corporate socialism for decades while working people operate under artificial limits. Most Americans experience these policies daily without recognizing them as part of the same project.

Free trade agreements and offshoring. NAFTA in 1994, permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, the WTO accession that followed, and the TPP that almost passed. Each agreement was sold as expanding consumer access to cheap goods. The actual effect was to expose American manufacturing labor to global wage competition without any equivalent restructuring of capital ownership. Real wages for non-college-educated workers stagnated for two decades while corporate profit margins on offshored production expanded. The asset-holder class captured the productivity gains. The wage earners absorbed the dislocation.

Right-to-work laws and union destruction. Twenty-six states currently have right-to-work legislation in effect. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 enabled them to pass these laws, and the count grew through the 2010s. Private-sector union membership has fallen from roughly 35% in 1954 to under 6% today. Without unions, the counterweight that helped workers bargain for higher pay vanished. Pay growth decoupled from productivity growth. The depreciation rules and stock buybacks worked far better for shareholders precisely because labor could no longer organize to demand a share of the gains. Weakening unions was the precondition that made financialization politically sustainable.

Deregulation and “smaller government.” Airline deregulation in 1978, savings-and-loan deregulation in 1980, financial deregulation across the 1980s and 1990s, and the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing Glass-Steagall. Each step expanded what financial firms were allowed to do, and each step concentrated the gains in the asset-holder class. “Smaller government” was always smaller in one direction: smaller for capital, larger for the regulatory machinery that protects asset values. Bailouts and emergency lending are not exceptions to smaller government. They are what smaller government means when capital is the constituency.

Tax law tilted toward capital. Capital gains rates (the tax on profits from selling investments) lowered relative to ordinary income (the tax on wages). The carried-interest loophole, which lets hedge fund and private equity managers pay the lower capital-gains rate on what is effectively their compensation. The estate tax weakened across multiple administrations. The post-2017 21% corporate rate. Stepped-up basis at death, which erases capital-gains taxes when assets pass to heirs. The depreciation regime cataloged earlier is the front-line example. The rest is a forty-year rewriting of the tax code that shifted the tax burden away from capital and onto labor.

Buy, Borrow, Die. A specific exploit of the tax code lets the wealthy avoid income tax indefinitely. Wealthy households accumulate appreciating assets (stocks, real estate, businesses), then borrow against those assets at low interest rates rather than selling them. Those low rates are not accidental, and they are not necessarily exploitative on their own. The natural rate of interest in a country that issues its own currency tends toward zero. The exploitation is the unequal access: wealthy households know how the mechanics work and structure their finances around the resulting low-cost borrowing; ordinary Americans neither know how the system works nor can borrow on similar terms. The money from the loans is not taxable income. The assets continue to gain value. At death, the assets transfer to heirs at a “stepped-up basis,” which resets the original cost to current market value and erases all the gains from being taxed. The cycle then resets in the next generation. ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on leaked IRS records documented that the wealthiest Americans pay effective income tax rates close to zero by exploiting this loop.

Whole life insurance and “family bank” trust structures, sometimes called the Rockefeller Method, layer onto the same loop. The policy’s cash value grows tax-deferred. Policyholders borrow against the policy without paying tax on the borrowed amount. The death benefit transfers tax-free. The wealth passes across generations with minimal tax exposure. None of this is illegal. All of it is available to households with enough assets to enter it. The result is a machinery for handing concentrated wealth across generations while wage-earning households pay income tax on every paycheck.

Welfare and bankruptcy reform. The 1996 welfare reform tightened eligibility and time-limited benefits. The 2005 bankruptcy reform made personal bankruptcy harder while leaving corporate bankruptcy intact. Both shifted risk from the public balance sheet onto individual households. Both were sold as fiscal responsibility. Both moved wealth and security upward.

Privatization of public risk and security. A class of policy shifts has moved long-running publicly-administered programs into private profit-taking structures, shifting risk from public accounts to individual households or to private companies that take profits along the way. The 1978 creation of the 401(k) provision in the tax code, accelerated under Reagan, shifted American retirement saving from defined-benefit pensions (where employers bore the investment risk) to defined-contribution accounts (where individual workers bear the risk). Wall Street asset managers take fees on the resulting flows forever. Medicare Advantage, the privatized alternative to traditional Medicare, has grown from a small fraction of Medicare beneficiaries in the early 2000s to roughly half by the mid-2020s. The shift routes public Medicare funds through private insurance companies that take profits, while traditional fee-for-service Medicare keeps the public-administration cost structure. The pattern is consistent: public-administered programs that worked are converted into private-administered programs that extract.

Antitrust collapse and the rise of concentration. Through the 1970s the U.S. ran a serious antitrust regime that broke up dominant firms and blocked anti-competitive mergers. Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox (1978) and the Chicago school doctrine that followed effectively dismantled that regime. Antitrust enforcement collapsed during the Reagan administration and never substantially recovered. The result is documented: roughly three-quarters of U.S. industries became more concentrated between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s. Thomas Philippon’s The Great Reversal (2019) showed that U.S. markets are now less competitive than European ones, a complete inversion of the 1990s baseline. Europe kept up antitrust enforcement; the U.S. abandoned it. Concentrated industries extract monopoly rents (excess profits made possible by lack of competition) that flow to shareholders rather than to consumers as lower prices. Concentrated employer markets give workers fewer real alternatives to threaten leaving for, which holds wages down. The “free market” rhetoric that justifies the U.S. arrangement is actually false: U.S. markets are less free than European ones because legal market power concentrated in fewer hands has replaced real competition. As I argued in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship, restoring antitrust enforcement is part of what ordinary Americans have to demand.

Public investment, private capture. A specific class of mechanisms transfers wealth upward by funding the foundational research and infrastructure with public dollars, then privatizing the commercial upside. The internet emerged from DARPA-funded ARPANET in the 1960s; the trillion-dollar tech platforms commercialized it. GPS came from Department of Defense investment, was opened to civilian use starting in the 1980s, and now sits inside every smartphone and logistics chain. mRNA vaccine technology came from decades of NIH-funded basic research; Pfizer and Moderna captured over $54 billion in combined 2021 vaccine revenue. Every major component of the modern smartphone, touchscreen, GPS, internet, voice recognition, lithium-ion battery, traces to publicly-funded research, as Mariana Mazzucato documents in The Entrepreneurial State (2013). About a third of the most clinically important drugs in recent decades trace to NIH-funded basic research, then commercialized by private pharmaceutical companies that charge prices the same public can barely afford. Cleary, Beierlein, and others, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, documented that every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 through 2016 had NIH-funded research underlying it. The pattern is consistent: public takes the risk, public funding covers the foundational research, private captures the commercial upside, and the wealth concentrates at the top of the asset-holder class. The public should benefit first when public money built the underlying capability. Most Americans have not been taught this is a question they could ask, much less demand. Once the pattern is visible, alternatives become demandable: public-purpose licensing terms, royalties paid back to the public, public equity stakes in commercialized research, mandatory affordability conditions on drugs that came out of NIH-funded research.

Slow government and the “move fast” attack on procedural protection. Procedural slowness in government has a purpose. The studies, environmental reviews, public-comment periods, and multi-year deliberations are not bureaucratic inefficiency. They are features designed to protect ordinary people from being run over by concentrated interests. The “move fast” rhetoric, imported into political discourse from Silicon Valley, is a mechanism for bypassing those protections. The bypass routes the gains to whoever can move fast, which is the asset-holder class. Public input gets reframed as obstruction; local opposition gets recast as anti-progress.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox is currently making the argument in plain terms. Defending the Stratos data center project in Box Elder County over local opposition, Cox said: “I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not” (KSL). The project advanced through a state-level authority rather than through a county-led permitting process that would have given the public more input. Separately, the Salt Lake Tribune has documented that Cox’s family telecom company, CentraCom, doubled its fiber network during his decade in executive office and absorbed more than $32.6 million in taxpayer payments over the same period. In January 2025, the first executive order of Cox’s second term fast-tracked infrastructure permitting, and Cox invoked his prior CentraCom executive role as the rationale for “light regulations” (Deseret News). Cox personally denies any current relationship with the company, and CentraCom denies involvement in the Box Elder data center specifically (ABC4). The picture the available reporting supports is structural, not a personal-kickback story: a former family-telecom executive is building the procedural-shortcut machinery in the federal and state policy environment his family’s company has done well in, with the rhetorical justification stated openly that slow government is “the dumbest thing ever.” That is the architecture of socialism for the wealthy at the state and county scale, and the public’s preference for deliberation gets dismissed as inefficiency.

The pattern across these is consistent. Each policy was sold to the public on grounds the household-budget mythology made credible: free trade gives you cheaper goods, right-to-work protects your job, smaller government respects your money, welfare reform stops free riders, tax cuts on capital encourage investment that benefits everyone. Each policy did the opposite for the bottom 90%. The trick is the same trick the monetary mechanisms run. The public is told a household-budget story, and meanwhile a different arrangement actually transfers wealth and power upward.

This is why “socialism for the wealthy” cannot be reduced to monetary policy. It is the entire policy stack. The soft-money tool is the largest and most visible mechanism, but it sits inside a labor regime, a trade regime, a regulatory regime, and a tax regime all calibrated for the same outcome.

What the Mechanism Produces: Financialization

Step back from the mechanisms cataloged above, monetary and policy alike, and ask what they have in common. Each one moves dollars from the productive economy into financial assets. Each one pushes up the value of financial claims without pushing up the production of real goods and services. Each one rewards ownership of paper rather than the making of things. The pattern is not coincidental. It is what fifty years of public money-creation policy pointed upward looks like when you stop looking at the individual mechanisms and start looking at the whole.

The whole has a name: financialization. The financial sector grew from roughly 2.8% of U.S. GDP in 1950 to roughly 7-8% by 2008 and stayed there. Manufacturing went the other direction. The economy did not stop generating wealth, but the wealth it generated increasingly went to financial activity rather than to the production of goods and services. This is what I described in 50 Years of Economic Myths Have Delivered Americans Into Technofeudalism as the financial-sector-dominance era of the broader oligarchy project.

The stock market is the most visible site where this pattern operates. Most Americans treat “the market” as a barometer of the economy. It is not. The stock market is better understood as a capital sink: a place where excess capital in the system goes to inflate prices, mostly for wealthy shareholders.

The loop between deficit spending and stock-market inflation is direct. When the federal government runs deficits, it issues Treasury bonds. Large investors and institutions buy those bonds. The bonds pay guaranteed government-backed interest with low risk. A significant share of the cash income from those bonds then flows into the stock market and other asset markets, pushing prices up. The wealthy collect twice: bond interest on the way in, stock gains on the way out. The “safe asset” label on Treasury bonds hides the fact that they are part of the same pipeline that produces the asset-side socialism this essay describes.

Three observations sharpen the point. First, market cap (the total value of a company’s shares) under a soft-money system tells you almost nothing about how well that business is actually doing. It tells you how much capital is flowing toward the business. Money chasing a stock drives the price much more than business fundamentals do. Second, market activity is concentrated in a handful of stocks. The “market” that financial commentators celebrate is dominated by a small number of names whose price movements drive the indexes. Algorithmic trading and stock buybacks compound the effect. The stock market today is closer to an organized casino with a few dominant tables than a system for honestly pricing the broader productive economy. Third, the stock market is not currently designed to serve everyday people. It is designed to absorb excess capital and concentrate the gains in the asset-holding class. The stock market can be reengineered to serve everyday people. That requires the public understanding how it actually works, not how the cover story says it works.

Private equity is the parallel mechanism, operating outside public stock markets and largely outside public view. Private equity has grown from a niche investment activity in the 1980s into a multi-trillion-dollar industry with the U.S. as the dominant market. The model is consistent: acquire companies (often using borrowed money), extract value through special dividend payouts funded by more borrowing, sales of assets and real estate, and aggressive cost-cutting that often falls on workers, then exit. The gains flow to the investors and managers in the fund, concentrated in the asset-holder class. The losses, when they happen, often fall on the workers and customers of the acquired companies, on the pension funds that put up the capital, or on the public when bankruptcies leave creditors and communities holding the bag. Private equity is what financialization looks like when it operates one company at a time, away from the disciplining visibility of public stock markets.

The household consequence of this pattern is what most Americans live every day. Wages are tied to productive activity, which has been systematically defunded. Cost of living, particularly housing, healthcare, and education, is tied to assets whose prices have been systematically pushed up. The household experience is wages-flat-prices-up, year after year. The reason is that the public money-creation tool has been pointed at the second curve, not the first. As I argued in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship, what should constrain spending is the country’s actual capacity to produce things, not arithmetic. Financialization hides that capacity question by making finance look like productive activity.

The political consequence is more dangerous. An economy that mainly generates wealth through rising asset prices rather than through production cannot deliver shared prosperity, because asset ownership is concentrated by definition. The growth numbers report success while ordinary people experience decline. Democratic legitimacy erodes because the system tells ordinary Americans it is working when their lives are getting harder. That gap between the official picture and the lived experience is the political fuel for everything that has followed: the breakdown of public trust, the rise of authoritarian movements, the appeal of leaders who name the dysfunction even if they have no real plan to fix it. Financialization produced not only the asset-holder class but also the political vulnerability we are now living through.

Financialization is what “Socialism for the Wealthy” produces when you look at the whole economy at once. The mechanisms in the previous two sections are the dollar-by-dollar accounting. Financialization is what the accounting adds up to over fifty years.

How the System Survives Politically: The Mythology

How does the system survive when so many Americans should logically reject it? Because the system is protected by a deliberately maintained mythology about the national debt and government finance.

In this mythology, the federal government is like a household. Its spending is constrained by what it can “afford.” The national debt is a burden being passed to future generations. We must “live within our means.” Therefore proposals to spend on healthcare, housing, education, or income support must clear a budgetary bar that asks where the money will come from.

This mythology is selectively applied. It comes out in force whenever a policy would benefit the bottom 90%. It recedes silently whenever the question is whether to backstop a bank, ease financial conditions, cut taxes on capital gains, or bail out an asset class. In those cases, the money simply appears. The Fed’s balance sheet expands. The Treasury issues debt that the Fed buys. The financial press writes about “decisive action.”

The selective application is reinforced by a layer of backup arguments. The moment someone points out that taxpayer money isn’t actually scarce, or that the proposed beneficiaries aren’t actually undeserving, these arguments come out. Each is doing rhetorical work to keep the framing intact.

The most common backup is crowding-out theory, which I cover in Your Mainstream Economics Decoder Ring: the claim that government spending pushes private investment aside by competing for the same limited pool of savings. The claim presupposes the same fixed-pool zero-sum thinking the popular framing rests on. Even readers who understand how government money actually works often get sold this backup, which claims public spending hurts the broader economy.

Behind that sits inflation fear: the Weimar / Zimbabwe / Venezuela comparison used to dismiss any large-scale government spending. I work through why those comparisons don’t fit in UBI vs. UBA and in 50 Years of Economic Myths Have Delivered Americans Into Technofeudalism. The point worth holding here is that inflation is the real constraint on government spending, just not the way the popular framing claims. Real inflation comes from spending past the economy’s productive capacity. Inflation fear in the popular framing is a generic objection used to block any proposal, not a specific risk analysis tied to real resources.

And underneath all of it sits trickle-down distribution and the meritocracy myth: the case the wealthy and their defenders make for why it is good when they get more (trickle-down) and why they deserve to have it in the first place (meritocracy). Where the popular framing and the crowding-out and inflation-fear backups tell you why the public can’t have things, trickle-down and meritocracy tell you why it is good when the wealthy get them. Together they produce a one-sided framework: we can’t afford to help you, but helping the wealthy is helping you indirectly anyway. That last piece is what makes the lopsidedness feel morally legitimate, not just baked into the rules.

When even these backups fail, the asset-holder class falls back on emergency framing. Deficit spending classified as “emergency response” uses the public money-creation tool freely without ever triggering the “we can’t afford it” anxiety the rest of us are conditioned to feel. Bank bailout? Emergency. Pandemic asset support? Emergency. Silicon Valley Bank deposit guarantees? Emergency. None of those get challenged on funding, because the emergency framing makes the household-budget story disappear. The household-budget story returns the moment the proposed beneficiary is anyone other than asset holders. The wealthy get the real mechanism (deficit spending creates new dollars). Everyone else gets the false story (“how will we pay for it?”). That is the trick at the door of this essay.

The mythology is what holds the entire arrangement up. Without it, the lopsidedness would be too visible to sustain. With it, every act of giving public money to the wealthy looks like prudent crisis management, and every proposal to spend public money on ordinary Americans looks like reckless socialism. The actual reality is the inverse. As I argued in The U.S. National Debt Is Caused by Underspending, we carry a national debt because we have systematically underspent on the public good, not because we have overspent.

The natural next question is: why doesn’t either party expose this? Why has the mythology survived through Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, divided government, and unified government, all without anyone in power calling it what it is?

The answer, as I argue in Beyond Capitalism vs. Socialism, is that both parties benefit from keeping the public economically illiterate. Republicans invoke “fiscal responsibility” and “free markets” to block social programs while ignoring deficits for military spending and tax cuts. Democrats accept the premise of budget limits and argue merely about percentages rather than challenging the underlying confusion. Both parties pretend the federal government faces household-like budget limits because it is politically easier than explaining how the government’s money actually works to voters. A two-party system that keeps the public confused about how public money actually works is a two-party system that gets to keep choosing the beneficiaries.

The progressive side of this deserves a sharper line. As I documented in Why Progressives Are Accidentally Helping Authoritarians Win, the Democratic establishment accepted the household-finance framing through the Clinton, Obama, and pre-2021 Biden eras. Progressive movements often retreated from federal power to local fights that local revenues could never finance. The point is not that “both sides did it.” The point is that the mythology is not defeated by going along with it. The 2021-2022 Biden break with the framing, which I write about in The Best Presidency for Ordinary Americans Since the 1970s, was the first sustained federal challenge in forty years. It is the proof that the rest of this essay assumes is possible.

Among the people who keep it going while knowing it is false, this is fraud, not mythology. Mythology suggests an honest mistake or an organic story. The political class and the economic establishment that keep the household-budget story going know that it is false. They keep it going because the false story keeps the public from demanding things they could otherwise have. The functional name for this (a deliberately maintained false story told to people whose lived experience contradicts it, with the result that those people start to doubt their own perception) is gaslighting. The mythology is what most Americans carry. The fraud is what the people who taught them the mythology are running. Gaslighting is the political strategy that connects the two.

The fraud is backed by a system that gives it credibility. As I argued in Economics is not a Science, the field of economics has the prestige of a science (Nobel-equivalent prizes, peer-reviewed journals, university chairs, expert testimony) without the rigor of a science (no real standards for testing whether claims are true, theories that fail predictions never get retracted, a fixed set of conclusions that always favor the asset-holder class). That prestige is what makes the household-budget story believable to people who are not specialists. They are not arguing with a mistaken consensus. They are arguing with a field that calls itself science. The mythology is what the public carries. The credentialed fraud is what the field supplies. The wealthy use both.

This is what I called out in Technofeudalism. The myths are not innocent simplifications. They are the rhetorical infrastructure of fifty years of upward wealth transfer. As The Parasites’ Dilemma names, an economy that depends on its host population staying confused about how it works will eventually destroy that host. Economic insecurity makes us politically exploitable. The deficit mythology is what keeps that insecurity in place. It blocks the upward path from economic security to political independence, and it locks in the downward path from economic fragility to political dependence.

The mythology is also why “Socialism for the Wealthy” is not common political knowledge. Without the mythology, the title of this essay would describe the consensus understanding of how the U.S. economy works rather than a contrarian framing of it. The mythology is what makes the actual reality invisible to the people it runs against. Seeing the mythology clearly is the first step toward reengineering the system it protects.

What This Machinery Adds Up To

What we have walked through in the previous sections is not a list of complaints. It is the architecture of a system. The mechanisms catalogued at the monetary level (depreciation, buybacks, bailouts, QE), the policy level (trade, labor, deregulation, tax, welfare and bankruptcy, antitrust, public-investment capture, slow-government bypass), and the structural level (financialization, mythology supported by credentialed fraud) are not separate phenomena. They are the same project running on multiple layers.

Sixty-five years ago, President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address warned about the “military-industrial complex”: a structural alignment of defense industry, military establishment, and Congress that he saw as a new threat to democratic governance. He was describing one sector. The pattern catalogued above is the generalized version of the same concern, extended across the entire asset-holder economy in the half-century since.

We can now restate the term with the receipts behind it.

“Socialism for the Wealthy” describes a fifty-year pattern in which the government, using its money-creation powers post-1971, has systematically pushed up the value of assets concentrated in the top decile of American households. It absorbs the losses on those assets through bailouts and emergency programs. It uses tax law and regulation to permit corporate behaviors that pump up share prices. It gives capital owners an ongoing tax subsidy on the wear of their assets that wage earners don’t receive on theirs. And it blocks any similar intervention for ordinary people by invoking a budget-as-household story that magically disappears when the beneficiaries are wealthy.

By the right’s own definition of socialism, public resources directed to enrich a class of people through political action rather than market activity, this is socialism. Apply the test consistently and you cannot reach any other conclusion.

By any honest definition of capitalism, which requires capital holders to bear real risk in exchange for real returns, this is not capitalism. Real capitalism cannot survive a Fed standing by to prop up the stock market every time it falls. Real capitalism cannot survive systematic public guarantees against asset losses. What we have is the appearance of markets and the reality of government-directed wealth allocation, with the reality carefully hidden behind the appearance.

This is what I mean when I say in Technofeudalism that today’s tech and finance elites function as modern lords ruling over economically fragile populations. The lordship is not metaphorical. It is purchased, fifty years running, with publicly created money that we have been told we cannot afford to spend on ourselves.

That is the precise answer to the title of this essay. We have socialism already. We just don’t have it for ourselves.

What I am arguing for is neither what we have nor what democratic socialism proposes. The full case is in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship; the short version is capitalism bounded by democratic values, ensuring competitiveness, supported by socialized safety nets and serious human capital development of the kind I describe in UBI vs UBA, and oriented toward the country’s actual productive capacity rather than asset-price inflation.

The reason for democratic capitalism rather than democratic socialism is that it keeps the productive and innovative engine of market activity while binding it to democratic accountability and shared prosperity. Democratic socialism, by contrast, often replaces market mechanisms entirely, which tends to lose the engine and create its own concentration-of-power problems. The fight here is not capitalism versus socialism. It is whether the public’s money-creation tool is pointed at one class or at the whole country.

How This Was Built Historically: A Hundred-Year Convergence

The system that produces this fight has a hundred-year history. None of it requires conspiracy. There is no smoke-filled room. This essay’s diagnosis does not assume that anyone sat down to plan today’s outcome. The diagnosis is an account of interests that converged over a hundred years.

This kind of historical convergence has a name. Karl Polanyi, writing in The Great Transformation in 1944, argued that when unrestrained markets cause widespread economic dislocation, society pushes back. That pushback can take two forms. One is democratic and protective: the New Deal, the postwar European welfare states, the gains organized labor won, civil-rights expansions. The other is fascist and reactionary: the interwar European authoritarian movements, which channeled the same widespread anger into ethno-nationalist politics that protected concentrated wealth from democratic accountability while pretending to protect ordinary people from market forces. Polanyi argued that the path society takes depends on what political organization is available when the pushback arrives. The hundred-year arc described here is what happens when the asset-holder class, with a century of head-start in political organization, has channeled the public’s reactive movement into the second path rather than the first. Trump’s coalition is not an accident of American culture. It is the form Polanyi predicted the second movement would take when democratic-protective organization had been systematically suppressed.

The arc starts with the New Deal. Business interests opposed FDR’s social contract from the moment he signed it. The 1934 American Liberty League is the first organized expression of that opposition. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act weakened labor’s ability to organize. That same year, the Mont Pelerin Society launched what would become the neoliberal counter-revolution in economic theory. The 1971 Powell Memo organized corporate political activity into a coherent program. The 1980 Reagan election turned all of this into governing power, and Reagan’s record proves the engineering was deliberate. He campaigned on “fiscal responsibility” and against deficit spending. Once in office, he ran the largest peacetime deficits in American history at that time, deficits that funded military expansion and tax cuts for the asset-holder class. The deficit spending happened. It was pointed at the wealthy. The deficit-spending rhetoric continued to be applied to social programs that would have benefited everyone else. The contradiction was not an accident. It was the template all subsequent administrations either accepted or extended. The 1982 founding of the Federalist Society built the legal-doctrine and judicial-appointment machinery of the convergence and supplied a generation of federal judges. The 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling opened the door to unlimited corporate and dark-money political spending, and gave the convergence its modern political-finance scaffolding. The policy stack cataloged earlier in this essay is what that consolidation produced over the following four decades. None of these milestones required coordination across the others. They are visible artifacts of groups that converged, by different routes, on the same project: weakening federal capacity to act on behalf of ordinary Americans, weakening labor’s capacity to bargain, weakening democracy’s capacity to legitimately redirect resources, and concentrating the wealth and power that would otherwise have gone to public capacity into private hands.

The convergence required one specific tool: a way to keep ordinary Americans, particularly white working-class voters, attached to the project that was taking from them. The Southern Strategy, beginning with Goldwater in 1964 and put into practice by Nixon in 1968, supplied that tool. Republican strategist Lee Atwater described the strategy plainly in a 1981 interview: the language could not stay racially explicit in the post-Civil-Rights era, so the strategy moved to coded substitutes like states’ rights and busing, and eventually to economic euphemisms like tax cuts and fiscal responsibility, that achieved the same political effect through different words. As I traced in Good Faith is Democratic Infrastructure, the Southern Strategy was the political-organization side of the same project the economic strategy was running.

The culture war that followed is the distraction machinery of that project. Whatever the specific issue at any given time, immigration, religion in schools, “wokeness,” transgender athletes, the function is the same: redirect voter attention away from class warfare being waged by the asset-holder class and onto fights among the people the asset class is taking from. Christians who say they are “losing their country” are voicing this redirection in its purest form. The country those voters describe was never the actual America. The actual America’s founding premise is that people from different places, different backgrounds, and different values come together to build a country. To grieve the loss of a culturally homogeneous America is to grieve the loss of something this country was specifically designed not to be. The grief is real. The diagnosis offered by the culture-war coalition is false. These voters have not lost their country to immigrants or Black families or LGBTQ+ neighbors. They have lost the economic security that would have given them confidence in the country’s diversity, and they have lost it to the same hundred-year project that runs the asset-side socialism this essay describes.

Trump’s electoral coalition is what that hundred-year convergence looks like at the end-game. Racists, bigots, religious nationalists, anti-tax billionaires, anti-government libertarians, fascists, and white-grievance populists do not naturally agree about much. They agree on this project, because each of them has been cultivated by some part of it for a hundred years. The asset-holder class needs the labor-suppression coalition. The labor-suppression coalition needs the racial-grievance coalition. The racial-grievance coalition needs the religious-nationalist coalition, which I traced in Trump’s Iran War Is About Christian Nationalism. The religious-nationalist coalition needs the authoritarian-institutional coalition. Each piece protects the others from democratic accountability, and the asset-holder class at the top harvests the resulting wealth concentration. Trump is not the architect. Trump is what the convergence elects when it has accumulated enough institutional capture to put a figurehead through.

Ordinary, freedom-loving Americans who want to live peaceful, simple lives alongside their neighbors are not in this coalition. They have never been the beneficiaries of this project. They are who the project is run against. The story the project has told them for a hundred years, that the federal government cannot afford to invest in their futures, that immigrants and Black families and women are taking what is rightfully theirs, that traditional American identity is under threat from secular institutions, that democracy itself is the enemy of order, has been the price of admission. They have been told a story to keep them politically passive while the actual project of upward wealth concentration ran on. The outrage that gets channeled into the Trump coalition is real. It is redirected anger. What has been taken from these Americans was not taken by the people the coalition tells them to blame. It was taken by the same hundred-year project the coalition exists to protect. This essay names that project by its precise title: socialism for the wealthy, dressed in cultural and economic mythology so the people it runs against cannot see it clearly. The next section explains what they can do about it.

What Ordinary Americans Can Do: From Diagnosis to Action

Once you see that “Socialism for the Wealthy” describes the actual operation of the U.S. political economy, three things follow.

First, the question “How will we pay for it?” loses its one-sided power. We have already been underwriting it. We have been underwriting it for fifty years. We have just been underwriting it on behalf of the top decile. The real question is who the next round of public money-creation capacity should be pointed at.

Second, the choice between capitalism and socialism stops being useful. As I argue in Beyond Capitalism vs. Socialism, this either-or is a zombie idea, intellectually dead but still shambling through American political discourse. We do not have capitalism. We have a government-managed asset-inflation system with capitalist branding. The real question is not whether to choose markets or government. It is whether the design uses resources well to meet human needs. That is the question every successful economy in the world is already asking. We are still arguing about labels.

Third, the realistic political move becomes coherent. We are not going to undo the wealth concentration that fifty years of asset-side socialism has produced. The oligarchy is here. The institutional capture is real. The political power that comes with concentrated wealth has bought enough resilience to survive any near-term redistributive reform. That sounds like surrender. It is not. It is a clarifying move.

With those three things in mind, two common objections come up the moment you try to act on the diagnosis. They come from opposite political directions and both rest on the same household-budget framing.

As I argued in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship, even the popular progressive proposal to tax the billionaires reinforces the same hard-money mythology this essay just dismantled. The federal government does not need billionaire tax revenue. It creates money limited by the country’s capacity to produce, not by collected revenue. Tax-the-billionaires proposals do not actually pay for new public spending in a soft-money system. They redistribute wealth, which is a moral move, but the federal government does not need their tax revenue to fund public housing or healthcare or education. Confusing the two locks public energy onto a target the asset class does not actually have to defend. The problem is not too little tax collection. The problem is concentrated wealth corrupting the institutions that should constrain it. Demanding “fair-share taxation” as the alternative to the asset-side socialism keeps the public locked inside the same household-budget framing the asset class uses to keep us locked out.

A different objection often comes up from the other direction: any expansion of government action means more corruption. Bigger government, more graft. The empirical answer is that the current regime is already the corrupt outcome. Recent reporting on Trump second-term self-dealing documents a 17-fold increase in family business income driven by foreign-investor crypto token sales, hundreds of millions in UAE sovereign-fund investments into Trump-family ventures, a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” settlement created by Trump settling his own lawsuit against the IRS, and political committees spending nearly a million dollars at Trump properties in the first seven months of the second term. None of this happened because the federal government was too large. All of it happened because the federal government’s accountability structures were too weak. The four moves below are the accountability framework that makes ambitious public action safe rather than corrupting.

The real alternative is different. It does not require defeating the oligarchy. It requires shedding the mythology that makes the oligarchy’s continued capture politically passive. Oligarchs survive on our ignorance, not on our consent. Once individuals understand that the public money-creation tool exists, that the household-budget analogy is actually false, and that the tool is being pointed at one class while another is told the tool does not exist, the demand becomes coherent. Not “take from them.” Build for us. Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship lays out the program. Stakeholder Society supplies the philosophical frame: every American holds a real stake in the country, not a conditional one earned through market participation. UBI vs. UBA, a Job Guarantee, public provision of housing and healthcare and education, stock-market reform that redirects capital from price inflation to productive investment, antitrust enforcement that breaks up monopolies and prevents anti-competitive mergers, and the broader Opportunity Economics framework are not radical departures from how the United States operates. They are an application of the same public money-creation tool already in use, pointed in a different direction. The technical capacity exists. It has existed since 1971. The world you want is possible without you having to want to be wealthy or financialized yourself. The only thing missing is enough ordinary Americans who have shed the fraud to make the demand for that world coherent.

“Build for us” answers a question the closing has been hinting at but not stating. Why do ordinary Americans deserve a system built for them? The answer comes from a tradition in political philosophy called neo-republicanism, most clearly laid out by Philip Pettit. Freedom is not just the absence of someone interfering with you. It is the absence of someone having power over you. A worker is not free when their employer can, at any time, fire them and end their healthcare coverage, even if the employer never actually does. A tenant is not free when their landlord can, at any time, raise the rent beyond what they can pay. Financialization gives asset holders that kind of power over wage earners through arrangements that aren’t coercive in the everyday sense but still amount to one group having power over another. The system ordinary Americans deserve is the one in which they no longer have someone else’s power hanging over them. That is what the alternative architecture above is for. Universal Basic Assets reduces employer power over you. Public provision of healthcare and education reduces insurer and creditor power over you. The Job Guarantee reduces the fear of unemployment that gives those people power. None of these is a redistribution demand. Each one is a freedom demand.

The phrase “Socialism for the Wealthy” is the door, not the room. Once we walk through it, we are no longer arguing about whether public action to redirect resources is possible. We are arguing about who deserves it. That is a far better argument to be having.

There is also damage that this generation cannot expect to undo. The Trump administration has accelerated decades of institutional erosion into something closer to permanent loss. Foreign and trade relationships built over generations have been broken. Civil-rights protections have been rolled back. The dollar’s status as the global reserve currency has been put under pressure that did not exist five years ago. The legal and regulatory infrastructure that made American economic potential exceptional has been hollowed out. Some of this can be slowed. Most of it cannot be restored to the way it was. As I traced in The Best Presidency for Ordinary Americans Since the 1970s, the Biden administration’s break with the deficit mythology was the proof that direct challenge of the asset-side socialism is possible. The damage that followed shows what happens when the mythology and the authoritarian project come together. Despite these realities, what lifts my spirit is that I know Americans are not in the business of restoring what was lost. They are in the business of building a future that works for themselves and is an example to the world.

For fifty years we have not been having that argument. We have been having a different one, in which working Americans accept artificial constraints on the public capacity that has never once been constrained when the beneficiaries are wealthy. That argument has cost us a generation of housing, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and democratic strength.

It does not have to cost us another one. But it will, if we wait.

The historical record offers one important orientation. The current concentration of wealth and power most closely resembles the 1870s-1890s Gilded Age, the original era of robber barons, machine politics, and labor suppression. America’s response to that earlier convergence took thirty years to organize and never finished its work, but the Progressive Era it produced did real damage to that earlier oligarchy. Sherman Antitrust in 1890. The constitutional income tax in 1913. Women’s suffrage in 1920. The labor protections of the Wagner Act in 1935. None of it was complete. All of it mattered. The current moment is not unprecedented. It is the second Gilded Age, and the response to the first one tells us what democratic counter-organization looks like and how long it takes.

As I argued in Be a Builder, nobody is coming to save us. No candidate, no court ruling, no election cycle is going to restore the social contract from the top down. The hundred-year project that built the asset-side socialism is institutional, organized, and resourced. It does not surrender voluntarily. The only counter-organization in American history that has ever actually rolled back this kind of concentration was citizen-built, citizen-funded, and citizen-led. The Progressive Era. The New Deal coalition. The Civil Rights Movement. None of them waited for permission. None of them had a sympathetic federal government to start with.

Before the work below, it’s worth recalling who the system has been running for and against. The asset-holder class this essay describes is the ultra-wealthy and billionaire class named in the opener, not the broader middle class and not most of the top 10%. The work of rebuilding democracy and capitalism is for everyone else. That is most Americans. They are the people the system has been running against for fifty years and the people the four moves below are addressed to.

How do you eat an elephant? A little at a time. The hundred-year project this essay describes did not assemble itself overnight. It took fifty years of organizing, fifty years of policy-making, fifty years of mythology maintenance to arrive at the system we now describe as socialism for the wealthy. Reversing it will take comparable time. There is no overnight fix. Tax-the-rich proposals do not fix it because, as we have already seen, they reinforce the same mythology. Defeating the oligarchy in a single election cycle does not fix it because the wealth concentration is already baked in. What can be done, over years, over decades, over the long arc that bent the wrong way, is for ordinary people to reengineer democracy and capitalism themselves. The only way to do that is to understand how the current system actually works. That is what this essay is for. Supporting and advocating for politicians who actively talk about the policies in this essay is one of the moves below. None of those politicians will lead with this on their own. They will follow public pressure once enough ordinary Americans carry the actual understanding into their politics.

The work in front of us comes in four moves, and they have to happen in this order. The reason the moves are sequenced rather than singular is that the machinery is not a single thing to attack. It is interconnected, and interconnected systems require interconnected counter-organization. The four moves below are not aspirational. They are the real handles available to any ordinary American who has read this far.

Be informed. The mythology this essay dismantles is not optional reading for an ordinary American living in this country. Every American who still carries the household-budget metaphor as a real constraint on federal action is, regardless of party, operating inside a frame the asset class wrote. The first work is shedding that frame.

Know what is possible. The alternative is real, not aspirational. The technical capacity exists. The constraint is political will, and political will follows from the public actually understanding the choice.

Act collectively. Individuals shedding the mythology is necessary but not sufficient. The system runs on coordinated organization, and only coordinated organization can answer it. That coordination begins where the Progressive Era’s coordination began: in workplaces, in neighborhoods, in civic associations, in mutual-aid networks, in schools and churches and unions and the local political structures the convergence has spent a century weakening. The work is not glamorous. It is also not mysterious. People have done it before. People are doing it now.

Demand leaders who actually govern. Citizen organization needs electoral expression. The leaders we elect should fund transparency, build reporting and oversight infrastructure, and accept accountability to the electorate, not the indignance and contempt for the public we have seen from the Trump administration. As I argued in Defending Democratic Capitalism Through Capacity Stewardship, the demand framework is specific: quality knowledge from academia, quality institutions from government, transparency in agency operations, accountability when officials fail. Voting is the minimum. Both parties are currently captured by the household-budget framing. Neither will lead with the actual reality voluntarily. The work of forcing them to talk about it falls to the ordinary Americans who have shed the fraud and can articulate the specific demand. Politicians follow articulated public pressure; they almost never lead it. The civic work of telling the people we elect what we actually expect from them, and refusing to settle for performance instead of governance, is the rest of it.

Now you know how the machinery works. The four moves above are not theory. They are the real handles that have been hidden from you for a hundred years. Pick them up, or watch the convergence finish what it started.

The handles are real. The choice is yours.

References

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31. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Why Health Care Matters and the Current Debt Does Not.” Regional Economist, October 2011. https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/october-2011/why-health-care-matters-and-the-current-debt-does-not
32. Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press, 2013.
33. Schott, Bryan, and Tony Semerad. “Here’s why Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s family business has become an internet powerhouse.” Salt Lake Tribune, January 18, 2024. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2024/01/18/why-utah-gov-spencer-coxs-family/
34. Hart, Ava. “CentraCom, tied to Gov. Cox’s family, denies involvement in Box Elder County data center.” ABC4 Utah, May 7, 2026. https://www.abc4.com/news/politics/inside-utah-politics/centracom-gov-coxs-box-elder-county-data/
35. Tavss, Jeff. “Gov. Cox admits his recent comments on proposed data center did not meet his ‘expectations’.” Fox 13 News Utah, May 8, 2026. https://www.fox13now.com/news/politics/gov-cox-admits-recent-comments-on-proposed-data-center-did-not-meet-his-expectations
36. Hart, Ava. “Governor Cox addresses Utah drought, data centers in monthly news conference.” ABC4 Utah, April 30, 2026. https://www.abc4.com/news/politics/governor-cox-address-utah-drought-data-centers/
37. Standard-Examiner. “Massive Box Elder County data center could increase Utah’s carbon emissions by 50%.” May 2, 2026. https://www.standard.net/news/2026/may/02/massive-box-elder-county-data-center-could-increase-utahs-carbon-emissions-by-50/
38. KSL. “Cox backs Box Elder County data center proposal, in part, due to national security factors.” April 30, 2026. https://www.ksl.com/article/51491313/cox-backs-box-elder-county-data-center-proposal-in-part-due-to-national-security-factors
39. Utah News Dispatch. “‘I seek to do better,’ Cox says after heated comments on Box Elder County data center.” May 8, 2026. https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/08/cox-seeks-to-to-better-after-heated-comments-on-box-elder-data-center/
40. Deseret News. “Utah Gov. Cox signs order to permit large infrastructure projects.” January 11, 2025. https://www.deseret.com/politics/2025/01/09/utah-governor-spencer-cox-signs-executive-order-on-permitting-reform/
41. KSL. “Gov. Cox signs first executive order of 2nd term to fast-track large infrastructure projects.” January 2025. https://www.ksl.com/article/51225770/gov-cox-signs-first-executive-order-of-2nd-term-to-fast-track-large-infrastructure-projects
42. ProPublica. “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.” 2021 series. https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
43. Cleary, Ekaterina Galkina; Jennifer M. Beierlein; Navleen Surjit Khanuja; Laura M. McNamee; and Fred D. Ledley. “Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010-2016.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2018. Documented that NIH funding contributed to research underlying every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 through 2016.
44. Greenspan, Alan. Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget, March 1997. “There is no way that we can default on our debt as long as we have a printing press.” Greenspan made the same point in subsequent testimony and remarks, including his August 7, 2011 Meet the Press interview on US default risk.
45. Bernanke, Ben. Interview with Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, CBS News, March 15, 2009. Bernanke explained the Fed’s crisis-era account-crediting mechanism, noting that “it’s not tax money” and that the Fed credits the banks’ accounts at the Fed electronically, “much more akin to printing money than borrowing.”
46. Powell, Jerome. Interview with Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, CBS News, March 22, 2020. Powell stated that “there’s an infinite amount of cash in the Federal Reserve” when describing the Fed’s capacity to supply liquidity during the COVID crisis.
47. McLeay, Michael; Amar Radia; and Ryland Thomas. “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1. The canonical institutional explanation of money creation in a sovereign-currency economy.
48. Bork, Robert H. The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself. Basic Books, 1978. The foundational text of the Chicago school antitrust doctrine that dismantled the U.S. antitrust regime starting in the Reagan administration.
49. Lerner, Abba P. “Functional Finance and the Federal Debt.” Social Research, vol. 10, no. 1, February 1943. Lerner’s foundational statement that government spending should be judged by its real effects (employment, inflation, output) rather than by budget-balance arithmetic.
50. Atwater, Lee. Interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis, 1981. Originally published anonymously in Lamis’s The Two-Party South (Oxford University Press, 1984), with Atwater identified as the speaker after his death. Atwater’s plain description of how Southern Strategy rhetoric moved from explicitly racial language to coded substitutes and eventually to economic euphemisms.
51. S&P Dow Jones Indices. “S&P 500 Buybacks.” Quarterly and annual share repurchase report. 2024 annual data showed approximately $943 billion in S&P 500 share repurchases, an all-time record. https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/
52. S&P Dow Jones Indices. “S&P 500 Concentration.” 2024-2025 data showing the top ten S&P 500 stocks (the “Magnificent Seven” plus a small handful of additional mega-caps) accounted for approximately 35% of the index’s total market capitalization, an all-time concentration high exceeding the dot-com peak. https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/
53. Congressional Budget Office. “Estimated Budgetary Effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.” CBO projected the Act would add approximately $3.4-3.8 trillion to the federal deficit over the 2025-2034 budget window. https://www.cbo.gov/