Capitalism was made possible by the emergence of democratic societies. These societies shed economic elitism and allowed increasing portions of the population to access wealth.
The core engine of capitalism is one of the most common basic instincts…greed. Hard work, skill acquisition, and innovation can combine to elevate a child born in poverty to great wealth and prosperity. Under these circumstances, everyone had a chance to earn financial independence. And as a result, there was no need for the poor to resent the rich because they too have the opportunity to be rich one day.
What went wrong? Greed
As the descendants of poverty elevated to great wealth, their greed inspired them to use their resources to manipulate the free market to consolidate wealth to themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The propensity of free market capitalism to create severe wealth inequality is not new. Historically, these periods of severe financial imbalance were corrected by economic depressions, which re-leveled the opportunity to access wealth for the broader society.
By the 1970’s, the Powell Manifesto encouraged wealthy people to protect their interests by investing enormous resources to co-opt the government, university system, and mass media. The point of these investments was to prevent the economic correction that restores financial opportunities for the general population.
In the 1990’s, Alan Greenspan accomplished the first “soft” landing in US history by reversing a business cycle slow down without an economic recession. And by 2009, the Congress and the Federal Reserve prevented the new Great Depression by giving the wealthiest holders of capital trillions of dollars in public funds to cover private losses. The net effect is to metastasize severe economic inequality as the new norm of the free market economy.
Free market manipulation, and economic globalism, combined with accelerated automation has effectively subjugated the broad working class to involuntary servitude.
While the wealthy have been successful preventing the restoration of economic opportunity for the general population, they have also earned the contempt of people who now understand they will never have financial security.
