Posts Tagged ‘Wealth’

The Politics of the Commons

Posted: August 13, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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What happens when a society starts asking whether everything should have a price?

For most of the last century, socialism carried a particular weight in American politics. It was less a political philosophy than a warning label.

Socialism meant government control. Communism. The Soviet Union. Central planning. Bread lines. The loss of individual freedom. For generations of Americans, the argument was settled before it began.

Capitalism meant freedom. Socialism meant the opposite. But something has changed.

In 2025, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor of the nation’s largest city. He was sworn in on January 1, 2026. A political label that once made national candidates nervous had become part of a winning campaign for one of America’s most prominent political offices. Mamdani is not the beginning of this shift.

Bernie Sanders spent years making democratic socialism part of the American political conversation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped turn that conversation into a generational movement. In August 2026, progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, another sign of the political left’s growing influence, although El-Sayed himself is better described as a progressive than a democratic socialist.

The left is not simply talking about socialism anymore. It is asking voters to govern with some of its ideas.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether America is becoming socialist. It is why socialism has become politically thinkable again.

Because Americans have been having this argument for a very long time. Sometimes, we just haven’t called it socialism.

The Things We Already Share

Imagine introducing the public library to America today.

A politician proposes building a publicly funded institution where anyone can walk inside, borrow books without paying, use computers, access the internet, attend programs, or simply sit somewhere warm. There is no profit requirement. The service exists because we have decided that access to information benefits the community.

Would we call that socialism? Probably not. We call it a library.

The same is true of fire departments. Nobody asks whether a burning house is profitable enough to justify putting it out. We decided that fire protection is a public good. So we tax ourselves to maintain the institution before anyone needs it.

The same principle applies to public schools, roads, sanitation systems, parks, public transit, and countless other institutions.

The point is not that a library is secretly socialism. It isn’t. The point is that America has never operated according to a pure market model.

We have always maintained a commons: resources, institutions, and services we collectively decide should exist for public benefit. The argument has never really been whether the commons should exist. The argument is where its boundaries should be.

America Has Been Here Before

History makes the argument more complicated.

When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. The federal government responded by dramatically expanding its role in American economic life.

The New Deal created programs for employment, infrastructure, financial regulation, agricultural support, and social insurance. The Social Security Act of 1935 established federal old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and assistance for vulnerable Americans.

The United States did not become a centrally planned socialist economy. Private property remained. Private enterprise remained. Markets remained.

But Americans increasingly accepted that some economic risks were too consequential to leave entirely to individuals.
  • Old age.
  • Unemployment.
  • Economic collapse.

The New Deal did not abolish capitalism. It put boundaries around it. That distinction matters. Capitalism and collective provision have never been mutually exclusive in the United States. The American economy has always been a hybrid.

The question has always been how much of that hybrid should belong to the market and how much to the public.

When the Market Becomes the Default Answer

For several decades, American political thought moved strongly in one direction.

Government was increasingly treated as the problem. Markets were increasingly treated as the solution.

There were good reasons for some of this. Markets can be remarkably effective. Competition can drive innovation. Private enterprise can respond quickly to demand. Profit can provide powerful incentives to create things people actually want.

Government can be slow, expensive, bureaucratic, and profoundly incompetent. None of that should be ignored because democratic socialism is having a political moment. But markets have limitations too.

A market does not ask whether something is necessary. It asks whether someone can pay for it. Those are not the same question.

A functioning housing market can coexist with millions of renters spending unsustainable portions of their income on housing. In 2023, more than 21 million U.S. renters, or 49.7% of renters, that the Census calculated, spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

A functioning healthcare market can coexist with enormous medical debt. KFF estimates that Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, including approximately 14 million adults who owe more than $1,000.

And a wealthy economy can coexist with widespread financial fragility. In the Federal Reserve’s latest household survey, 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. That means 37% could not. Thirteen percent said they could not cover the expense by any means.

None of those statistics proves that capitalism is inherently bad. They prove something narrower: Economic growth and economic security are not the same thing.

The Price of Being Poor

This may be where the renewed interest in democratic socialism becomes easier to understand. A market economy can feel remarkably liberating when you have the resources to navigate it.

If a service doesn’t work, buy another one. If housing becomes expensive, move. If healthcare is inadequate, find a better plan. If transportation doesn’t work, buy a car. If wages are inadequate, invest.

But those choices depend on something that isn’t distributed equally: the ability to absorb risk.

A person with savings can survive an unexpected bill. A person without savings may have to borrow.

A homeowner with substantial equity has options. A person with no assets has fewer.

A person with inherited wealth can use it as a safety net. A person without it begins an emergency from zero.

This is where arguments about capitalism can become strangely abstract. We talk about markets, incentives, GDP, productivity and efficiency. But economies are ultimately experienced by human beings.

The question isn’t simply whether the economy is growing. It is whether people can build stable lives inside it.

The Wealth Behind the Safety Net

Wealth changes the meaning of risk.

The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show how concentrated household wealth remains. In the first quarter of 2026, the top 1% held roughly 31% of U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50% held roughly 4%.

The composition matters, too. The top of the distribution holds enormous amounts of financial assets that can appreciate, generate income, and be liquidated when necessary. Households with little accumulated wealth have far less room to absorb a shock.

Income pays the bills. Wealth absorbs shocks.

Wealth buys time. It allows someone to leave a bad job, survive unemployment, help a child through school, make a down payment, absorb a medical emergency, or wait for a better opportunity. Without wealth, the same events can become existential. This is why arguments about “personal responsibility” can become incomplete.

Responsibility matters. So does the amount of room a person has to exercise it.

The Label Problem

There is another problem with the debate. Americans do not necessarily agree on what socialism means.

For some, it means public ownership of major industries. For others, it means universal healthcare.

For some, it means stronger unions, higher taxes on wealthy households, public housing, or expanded social programs. For others, it still means Soviet-style communism.

Those are not the same thing. Democratic socialism is not communism. Social democracy is not democratic socialism.

A mixed economy is not a centrally planned economy. And a public library is not evidence that the United States secretly became the Soviet Union.

These distinctions matter because political language can become so imprecise that the label replaces the argument.

There is an important warning here for the left, too. If “socialism” becomes a catch-all word for every policy someone likes, the word loses analytical meaning. If it means everything, it explains nothing.

Democratic Socialism Gets No Free Pass

Taking democratic socialism seriously does not mean giving it a free pass. Quite the opposite.

If the movement wants to govern rather than merely protest, its ideas have to survive contact with reality.
  • How much should government provide?
  • How much should it cost?
  • Who pays?
  • What happens when public institutions become inefficient?
  • What happens when bureaucracy becomes its own interest group?
  • How much taxation is economically sustainable?
  • Where should government stop?
  • What role should private enterprise continue to play?
  • How do we preserve innovation?
  • What happens when a public program becomes an expensive institution that no longer works very well?

Government is not inherently virtuous. Markets are not inherently virtuous.

Both are systems created and operated by human beings. Both have incentives. Both can be captured by powerful interests. Both can become inefficient. Both can produce extraordinary results under the right conditions.

The point isn’t to replace one ideology with another. It is to stop pretending that either system can answer every question.

The Argument for Capitalism

There is, of course, a serious argument on the other side. Capitalism has generated enormous increases in productivity, technological innovation, consumer abundance, and material living standards. Markets coordinate millions of individual decisions without requiring a central authority to determine what people should produce or consume.

Government intervention can solve problems, but it can also create new ones. Regulation can become bureaucratic. Public programs can become inefficient. Taxation can distort incentives. Politicians can distribute resources according to political incentives rather than social needs.

Some problems attributed to capitalism may actually be failures of policy: restrictive zoning, regulatory capture, insufficient housing construction, monopolistic behavior, or poorly designed government programs.

There is also a legitimate philosophical argument that individuals should retain responsibility for some of life’s risks rather than transferring every risk to the state. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

But it leaves us with another question: How much individual responsibility is reasonable when the consequences of failure can be catastrophic?

Democratic Socialism Meets Reality

This is where Zohran Mamdani becomes more useful than a political symbol.

His administration is now attempting to turn some of the ideas that defined his campaign into municipal policy. Housing is one example.

Mamdani’s administration has proposed creating 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade, with nearly $5 billion in planned investment over two years. It has also proposed a city-backed housing insurance program intended to reduce insurance costs for affordable and rent-stabilized housing.

His fiscal approach offers another test. The proposed FY2027 executive budget totals $124.7 billion. The administration says it closed a $12 billion inherited budget gap through savings, new revenue, and state partnership while avoiding property-tax increases and preserving long-term reserves.

These are not proof that democratic socialism works. They are not proof that it doesn’t. They are something more useful: a test.

If the movement wants to move from ideology to governance, voters now have the opportunity to evaluate what happens when those ideas encounter budgets, bureaucracy, housing markets, competing priorities, and the practical limits of municipal government.

That is how political ideas should ultimately be judged. Not by the label. By the results.

The Real Political Argument

Maybe this is why the current debate feels different from the old Cold War argument.

The question being asked by many voters isn’t necessarily: “Do you want socialism?”

It is: “Why can’t I afford to live?”

Why is housing so expensive? Why does healthcare threaten financial stability? Why can full-time employment still leave someone economically insecure? Why does an economy capable of producing extraordinary wealth struggle to give ordinary people enough room to absorb an ordinary emergency?

Those questions existed before Bernie Sanders. They existed before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They existed before Zohran Mamdani.

Perhaps the political movement isn’t creating the questions. Perhaps the questions are creating the movement.

We should be careful with that conclusion. Political momentum has many causes, and economic insecurity is not the only possible explanation. But the connection is difficult to ignore.

Gallup’s 2025 polling found that Americans overall still viewed capitalism more favorably than socialism. Among Democrats, however, the balance had flipped: 66% viewed socialism favorably compared with 42% who viewed capitalism favorably.

That is not a socialist revolution. It is something more interesting.

A political constituency is becoming less convinced that the existing economic system deserves to be treated as the unquestioned default.

The Politics of the Commons

The argument over socialism may therefore be less about socialism than we think.

It may be about something much older: What do we owe one another?

Every society answers that question whether it admits it or not. We decide that children deserve education. We decide that roads should exist even when individual roads aren’t profitable. We decide that fires should be extinguished regardless of the homeowner’s income. We decide that libraries should lend books without charging by the page.

During the New Deal, we decided that old age and unemployment should not be entirely private risks. We have repeatedly decided that some things are too important to leave entirely to the market.

The disagreement is over where we draw the line. And that line is never permanent.
  • It moved during the Progressive Era.
  • It moved during the New Deal.
  • It moved during the Great Society.
  • It moved during the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century.

And perhaps it is moving again. That doesn’t necessarily mean America is becoming socialist. It may mean Americans are reconsidering what they believe the market is actually for.

Markets are extraordinarily useful tools. But tools have purposes. A hammer is excellent at driving a nail. It is terrible at putting out a fire.

Perhaps the question confronting American politics isn’t whether we should choose capitalism or socialism. Perhaps it is whether we’ve spent so long treating the market as the answer that we’ve forgotten to ask what question we’re actually trying to solve.

That is the politics of the commons.

💸 The Trillion Dollar Test 💰

Posted: June 22, 2026 in Excess and Algorithms
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A Civilization Measured by What It Tolerates

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis

  • Somewhere tonight, a child will go to bed hungry.
  • Somewhere tonight, a family will sleep in a car.
  • Somewhere tonight, someone will drink unsafe water because there is no alternative.
  • Somewhere tonight, a worker will delay medical care because the bill would be too high.

And somewhere in the same world, one man has accumulated a fortune measured in a trillion. That man is Elon Musk.

In the United States alone, nearly 750,000 people experienced homelessness during the most recent federal count. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people continue to face chronic hunger. Yet at the same time, we have entered an era where an individual can possess wealth greater than the annual economic output of many nations.

I want to be clear from the beginning: I do not believe any human being should possess a trillion dollars. Not Elon Musk. Not the next visionary entrepreneur. Not the most brilliant innovator in history. Not anyone.

This is not because I oppose success. It is not because I oppose innovation. It is not because I believe wealth itself is immoral. It is because a trillion dollars is no longer a measure of success. It is a measure of concentration. A measure of ownership. A measure of power.

And when wealth reaches that scale, the question is no longer what one individual earned. The question becomes what kind of society allows so much wealth to accumulate in one place while so many basic human needs remain unmet.

When Numbers Stop Meaning Anything

Human beings are terrible at understanding very large numbers.

A million dollars sounds enormous. A billion dollars sounds unimaginable. A trillion dollars belongs to an entirely different category.

A million seconds is about eleven days. A billion seconds is about thirty-one years. A trillion seconds is nearly thirty-two thousand years. The scale becomes almost meaningless.

At that point, wealth stops resembling personal prosperity and starts resembling infrastructure. Many governments operate with fewer resources than the fortune now controlled by a single individual. That fact alone should give us pause.

There is a difference between being wealthy and possessing wealth on a civilizational scale.

I have no objection to people becoming rich. I have no objection to people building successful companies. But somewhere between prosperity and a trillion dollars, something changes.

The discussion is no longer about achievement. It becomes a discussion about power.

Every era has a number that reveals what it worships.

  • Ancient empires measured land.
  • Medieval kingdoms measured bloodlines.
  • Industrial societies measured production.
  • Ours measures valuation.

We are told that a trillion dollars is evidence of genius. Perhaps it is. But it is also evidence of something else: a civilization increasingly comfortable with concentrations of wealth and power that previous generations would have considered alarming.

The Lords Return

Defenders of extreme wealth often argue that today’s billionaires earned their fortunes while yesterday’s kings inherited theirs. Fair enough.

But if the outcome is one individual possessing more economic influence than entire nations, the distinction begins to matter less.

  • Medieval kings controlled land.
  • Modern billionaires control platforms.
  • Medieval lords controlled roads, trade routes, and resources.
  • Modern corporations increasingly control the digital roads through which communication, commerce, information, and culture flow.

History spent centuries dismantling hereditary aristocracies because concentrated power was considered dangerous.

Today we celebrate concentrations of power that medieval rulers could scarcely imagine. The lesson of history was never that wealth creation is evil. The lesson was that power concentrated beyond accountability eventually becomes dangerous.

That lesson has not become less relevant simply because the castles have been replaced with data centers.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

America has already experienced a version of this story. The late nineteenth century produced industrial fortunes so vast that figures like Rockefeller and Carnegie seemed larger than life.

The era became known as the Gilded Age.

  • Economic growth exploded.
  • Innovation accelerated.
  • Industrial output soared.

Yet so did inequality, labor unrest, corruption, and the influence of private wealth over public institutions.

The problem was never that these men built successful enterprises. The problem was the concentration of power that followed. Eventually the public demanded antitrust laws, labor protections, and reforms designed to prevent private fortunes from eclipsing democratic institutions.

The lesson was not that markets are bad. The lesson was that markets left entirely unchecked tend to concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

Today we appear to be relearning that lesson.

The Machine That Makes Billionaires

Elon Musk did not personally build a trillion-dollars worth of products. No human being could.

A trillion-dollar fortune is not created through labor alone. It emerges from ownership.

  • From financial markets.
  • From automation.
  • From intellectual property.
  • From global supply chains.
  • From algorithms.
  • From systems that allow value to compound at extraordinary rates.

This is where economist Thomas Piketty becomes important. Piketty’s research argues that wealth naturally concentrates when returns on capital consistently outpace the growth of the broader economy.

In simple terms, wealth generates more wealth.

  • Ownership attracts more ownership.
  • Capital compounds.
  • The result is not necessarily a conspiracy.
  • It is a tendency.
  • A machine.
  • A system.

Modern capitalism has become remarkably effective at scaling value. What it has not solved is how to prevent that value from concentrating at levels that begin to rival democratic institutions themselves.

The question is not whether Elon Musk worked hard. The question is why modern economic systems repeatedly produce concentrations of wealth that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

A Civilization’s Report Card

Imagine a society where every child has enough food.

  • Every family has safe housing.
  • Every community has clean drinking water.
  • Every citizen has access to healthcare.
  • Every worker can meet their basic needs.

Now imagine someone becomes a trillionaire.

We could still debate whether that concentration of wealth is healthy. But that is not the world we live in.

The world we live in still contains homelessness.

  • It still contains hunger.
  • It still contains medical debt.
  • It still contains preventable suffering.

These are not mysteries. They are not unsolvable. They are choices.

The scandal is not that poverty exists. Poverty has always existed.

The scandal is that poverty exists alongside unprecedented abundance.

We have solved the problems of production. We have not solved the problems of distribution.

The Question We Avoid

I believe a trillion dollars is a moral failure. Not merely the failure of one individual. The failure of a society. Because every trillion-dollar fortune exists alongside needs that remain unmet.

We are encouraged to marvel at the size of the fortune. Perhaps we should be asking what the existence of that fortune says about everyone who was left behind.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent years warning that extreme inequality is not only unfair but economically inefficient and politically destabilizing. That should concern everyone regardless of ideology.

Extreme poverty creates instability. Extreme concentrations of wealth create instability.

History repeatedly shows that societies become fragile when ordinary people begin to believe the rules only work for the powerful.

The danger is not that one man becomes rich. The danger is that millions conclude the game itself is rigged.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has often argued that the central political issue of our time is not left versus right but the concentration of power in institutions that become increasingly insulated from public accountability.

The same concern applies here. The question is not whether Elon Musk is a good person. The question is whether any individual should wield economic power on a scale once reserved for states.

What Happens Next?

Many people will celebrate the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire as proof that the system works.

I see something else. I see a warning light.

Not because success should be punished. Not because innovation should be discouraged.

But because no human being should possess that much wealth while so many struggle to obtain necessities.

A trillion dollars is not merely a fortune. It is a concentration of power unprecedented in modern history.

The real story is not Elon Musk. The real story is the world that made a trillionaire possible. A world capable of producing unimaginable abundance while leaving millions behind.

The question is no longer whether we can create trillionaires. The question is why we keep accepting them.

Wealth #Inequality Means #Democracy is a Farce

Posted: February 13, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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A government of the people, by the people, for the people in a world where cash rules everything around me.

We’re getting closer to the traditional national gaslighting of people to vote for the lesser of two evils. Gaslighting and voter shaming being the only options left of a corporate captured media and government.

Keep the facade going, there’s motions to go through. There’s time slots to fill, content to create, and appearances to make.

If people can barely survive after a decade which saw both political parties have control of government at one point or another, what is the point of voting? Unless voting third party. That’s where the gaslighting and voter shaming come into play. I wonder what Jill Stein will be blamed for this election season.

What a better life? GET A JOB! So then what do I need to participate in the farce of the decaying corpse of democracy for? Don’t super delegates pick who runs in the general election anyway? Doesn’t the electoral college mean that only a few swing states decide the presidential election anyway?

If voting was so important why isn’t it a national holiday? Like it is in other countries…

Vote local? Well that’s where I can see one vote having some value. Probably why we never hear about local elections. Hard to make us hate our neighbors over referendums and country treasurer battles.

If the masses are doing worse than they were before, habitually, for generations…what good is government? What is the point of elections?

Political theater, divide and conquer, evoke emotions, distract, tribalism…

How else can the 1% get the 99% to hate each other?

Red hates Blue

Blue hates Red

Elephant hates Donkey

Donkey hates Elephant

Blue Collar hates White Collar

White Collar hates Blue Collar

North hates South

South hates North

Half the country hates the other half

What a shame, what a waste, what a farce…

In America, we don’t have a democracy, we have economic totalitarianism.

One must pay attention, and do just a baseline level of research to find this truth although it becomes more obvious every year. The economic elites find less and less need to hide it. It’s becoming more common to say the quiet part out loud, in the open, on live mics on livestreams.

Keep the masses running the rate race fueled by promises and propaganda. Coerce them to work for a living until they’re burned out, bankrupt, or dead.

Just go along to get along. Gotta make rent, gotta put the groceries on credit. Can’t attend the protest cause I’m out of PTO, can’t take my PTO cause my copay went up again, can’t afford my copay cause groceries got more expensive for the forth year in a row.

What a shame, what a waste, what a farce…

#Oxfam Enlightens Excess of #Economic Elites

Posted: February 11, 2017 in Excess and Algorithms
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If half of the world has less money than less than ten people, something is either wrong or rigged. There is no middle ground or shade of gray. Either we are living in a world of kings and peasants or we are living in a world where all people are created equal. The very idea that there will always be poverty at a time of mega yachts, vacation homes, million dollar cars, Botox and private islands is to spit in the face of reason.

A very real present day consequence of this growing, institutional, massive wealth disparity is seen in the rise of populism politics in the industrialized world. Brexit, Donald Trump in America, the growing  Made in France movement, and so on. It has finally caught on that globalism doesn’t work for the common man, because it wasn’t designed or put in place by the common man. It was put in place by the elite, to benefit the elite. The manual labor workers of the first world have been forgotten and left behind. Whether on purpose or on accident no longer matters, they have made their voice heard by organizing and getting behind far right political parties and candidates.

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The political consequences of the wave of populism that we are currently in the beginning of, are just now starting to take shape. But politics is just the tip of what is going on. Follow the money, because neither political populism nor big philanthropy will be enough to stem the tide of the rising groups of people with no jobs, no homes, nothing to lose but debt.

They are going to the voting booth for now, protesting in mass on the streets for now. But the history of the world shows that concentrated wealth and power are the planted seeds for rebellion.  And unless the elite share the love as well as their wealth, it is not a question of if but when their favorable debt to liquidity ratio can no longer save them from the ratio of have-nots to haves that are past the point of no return.

Eight men possess more wealth than half the world combined? That doesn’t happen on accident. This has been done on purpose. This is long-term, purposeful, monetary migration. The problem is known. The solution is known. But the money keeps going the same direction, up. These super charged capitalists have certainly skirted some laws to amass their obscene wealth concentration. But nothing skirts Newton’s Third Law of Motion. What goes up, must come down.