In many ways we need a complete system reboot. More on that in future insights. But if this system is to continue and function, it needs more sharing to balance out its hoarding.
The paradox is as old as the ying yang of social & capital itself: left entirely to its own appetites, capitalism develops self-cannibalism. Wealth concentrates, monopolies calcify, labor becomes precarious, oligarchs start raping, politics is purchased wholesale, and eventually the public ceases to feel the system works for them at all. At that moment, capitalism’s greatest threat is no longer socialism. It is legitimacy collapse. This is where we are now.
This was precisely the crisis confronting Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. The United States was not merely suffering a recession; it was suffering a moral and institutional breakdown. Just like will be left after Rotting Chump Coligula. Banks failed, unemployment soared toward a quarter of the workforce, farmers were ruined, industrial workers starved, and extremist ideologies suddenly seemed plausible to millions. This is where we are now.
Roosevelt understood something many financiers did not: if democracy could not provide security, people would eventually seek salvation elsewhere. Thus the New Deal was not the abolition of capitalism. It was capitalism’s emergency surgery. And people got a little taste of demo social and liked it so much they voted him in for four terms. Creating lasting successes such as Social Security. Labor protections. Banking regulation. Public works. Rural electrification. Massive infrastructure. Union power. Deposit insurance. These were not Bolshevik seizures of industry. They are obvious improvements to the country that even the dumb dumbs could see with their own eyes. As well as stabilizers — mechanisms designed to prevent capitalism from degenerating into oligarchy on one side and revolutionary rage on the other.
One of the great ironies of modern history is that FDR saved American capitalism from American A hole capitalists themselves, many of whom denounced him as a traitor to his class while they were busily discrediting the entire economic order through greed, speculation, and social indifference. Now consider the United States in the 2020s.
The symptoms are different, but the structure rhymes: Extreme wealth concentration. Housing becoming unattainable. Medical debt functioning as quasi-feudal bondage. Gig labor replacing stable employment. Young people locked out of asset ownership. Infrastructure decay. Declining life expectancy. Political institutions increasingly captured by donors and corporate lobbying. Widespread loneliness and social fragmentation.
This is when people who don't know their history cease believing effort leads to advancement. And when social mobility dies, conspiracy and demagoguery flourish like fungus in a damp cellar.
The American empire has done a lot of successful imperial programming on American minds to cause unnecessary seizures among people who wholesale hate the very word socialism. Fox News brains of blended diarrhea imagine breadlines materializing the moment someone proposes public childcare. But if you don't realize that the Republicans secretly love socialism, for the Epstein class, and that banks and oil companies have been getting socialism for decades, that balancing regulated capitalism with democratic socialism means having government working more for working humans then just working for only the cutthroat Monopoly Men then not only are you lying to others, you are lying to yourself. What is meant is not state ownership of all enterprises. No one wants the government making our shoes or television sets, but it is instead the use of democratic power to prevent capital from hollowing out the republic that sustains it.
Things such as: Universal healthcare. Stronger labor unions. Public housing construction. Tuition reduction or free public college. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. Child allowances. Paid family leave. Higher marginal taxes on immense fortunes. Industrial policy and infrastructure investment. Strong public transportation. Robust pensions and retirement guarantees.
In most advanced democracies, ones that are not a dying empire of idiocracy, these are not considered the opening salvos of Leninism. They are base minimal for civilization.
And crucially, such policies can preserve markets by preserving consumption, workers, social trust, and democratic legitimacy. A population crushed by insecurity eventually either revolts or withdraws into nihilism. Neither outcome is particularly good for stable investment climates. The deeper point is philosophical.
Pure market absolutism mistakes capitalism for a law of nature rather than a political arrangement. Markets require courts, roads, educated workers, enforceable contracts, stable currency, scientific research, and social peace. In other words: public goods. The fantasy of a self-sustaining market order is rather like imagining a shark that has evolved beyond the need for water. FDR recognized this. So did many postwar European statesmen who built mixed economies after 1945. The most prosperous capitalist societies in history were not the least regulated. They were the ones that balanced enterprise with social obligation.
The real question for the 2020s is whether the American political system can reform capitalism democratically before public despair curdles into authoritarianism. Because history offers a grim lesson: when liberal democracies refuse modest redistribution and structural reform, they often end up confronting far more radical upheavals later. The fascist scumbag Epstein ruling class that will not permit social democracy let alone even more left wing democratic socialism may eventually discover it has prepared the stage for something much uglier. Or, stated plainly: if capitalism insists upon becoming a casino for oligarchs, the public eventually burns down the casino. The New Deal was an attempt to keep the building standing. This is why America needs more of that.