The Enshittification of America

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Will Myers

 First it is important to understand that Trump is not the cause of the enshittification of America. He is a consequence. Unless the system is fundamentally changed, the enshittification will continue even after Trump is long gone.As I’ve shown, wealth and power in America now reside in a relatively small group of (almost entirely) men — the American oligarchy. My prime example has been Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorganChase, the largest bank in the world — because he’s regarded by corporate Democrats as the most trusted business leader in America — but I could equally focus on Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry and David Ellison, or any other billionaire using his vast wealth to create and enhance his political power.The Core ContradictionThe oligarchy is not interested in serving America, yet it dominates American politics and essentially runs the American system.The oligarchy is not committed to the common good. It does not seek to raise the wages of working Americans, reduce inequalities of wealth and opportunity, guarantee all Americans access to good healthcare and a world-class education, or stop climate change.The oligarchy’s allegiance is to itself, and its major interest is enlarging its wealth and power. The easiest way for the oligarchy to accomplish this is to hold down the wages of working people, roll back regulations, enlarge its monopolies, find ever-cheaper places around the world to produce products and services, fight unions, and secure giant tax cuts for it and its corporations that result in less money for education, healthcare, and everything else most Americans need.The oligarchy cannot fulfill both roles: It cannot advocate for its giant banks or monopolistic corporations and simultaneously lead the nation. Dimon may sincerely believe that he’s a patriot before he’s the CEO of JPMorgan, but we would be foolhardy to rely on it.The difficulty is not that corporate power is beyond the control of the American government. It is that corporate power controls the American government. Yet giant American corporations have no special allegiance to the United States and no responsibility for the well-being of Americans.This contradiction has spawned three big conventional ideas about the American system that are dangerously wrong.Conventional but deceptive idea #1: Americans are richer than the citizens of other rich nationsA few Americans are, but the vast majority are not, when you consider all the public benefits that the citizens of other nations receive. Note, for example, that:— Most citizens of other wealthy nations receive free or nearly free healthcare, and most get free or nearly free college tuition. Americans receive neither.— Among the three dozen wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the lowest minimum wage when measured as a percentage of the median wage. The typical American worker puts in more hours on the job than Canadian, European, or Japanese workers.— The United States is the only wealthy nation that does not guarantee paid family leave. In Europe, the norm is three months paid leave. At most, Americans get 12 weeks of unpaid leave.— America is also the only rich nation that does not guarantee paid sick days. It is the only one that does not guarantee workers any vacation at all. The European Union’s 28 nations guarantee at least four weeks of paid vacation.— In other rich nations, most people who lose their jobs receive more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans. Employers cannot fire workers at will, as they can here.— American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations.— Top corporate executives in America make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries, and inequality of income and wealth is far wider in the United States than it is in any other wealthy country.— The American middle class is no longer the world’s richest. Considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class workers in Canada and much of Western Europe are better off than in the U.S. The working poor in Western Europe earn more than do the working poor in America.Why are most Americans poorer than the citizens of most other rich nations? It is because of the way power is allocated and wielded in the United States, by contrast with other rich countries. Consider:— Labor unions are stronger in Europe and Canada than they are in America, able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally. Only 6 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. As former New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse has observed, “In no other industrial nation do employers fight so hard to defeat, indeed quash, labor unions.” Over 25 percent of Canadian workers belong to a union, as do 37 percent of Italian workers, 67 percent of workers in Sweden, and 25 percent in the U.K.— Most other rich nations are parliamentary systems in which workers are represented by parties that specifically advocate for them. The United States has a two-party system in which the winning party gets all of a state’s electoral votes, thereby discouraging third parties.— Elections in other rich nations are less affected by big money than are elections in the United States, because other nations have stricter restraints on money in politics.— Governments in these nations often devise laws through tripartite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor, which further binds their corporations to their nations’ workforces.For all these reasons, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal as do the citizens of other rich nations. Governments elsewhere impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of it to middle- and lower-income households.Conventional but deceptive idea #2: The “free market” is separate from governmentThe second conventional idea perpetrated by the American oligarchy is that we work and live in a “free market” that’s neutral and natural — existing outside government, unaffected by how power is wielded in the system.We are repeatedly told that whatever inequalities and insecurities the market generates and whatever negative consequences it causes are beyond our control. Efforts to reduce inequality or insecurity are described as constraints on the market’s freedom, likely to cause grave unintended consequences.By this view, if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the “free market” has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s just the natural outcome of market forces.If the planet’s survival is endangered because of fossil fuels, that’s at most an “imperfection” in the market. If government attempts to deal with such market imperfections, it must do so modestly and carefully because the “free market” knows best. As Jamie Dimon put it, “Don’t mess up the machine that creates the value so you can do these things. The economy is what gave us everything.”This is bunk. In reality, the “free market” is nothing but a set of laws and rules about: What can be owned and traded (corporations? slaves? machine guns? nuclear bombs? babies? votes? the right to pollute?). On what terms (hostile takeovers? corporate monopolies? the right to organize unions? a minimum wage? the length of patent protections?). Under what conditions (uninsured derivatives? fraudulent mortgages? mandatory arbitration of disputes?). How to repay what’s owed (debtor’s prison? bankruptcy? corporate bailouts?). What’s private and what’s public (clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools?). And how to pay for what’s deemed to be public (corporate taxes? personal income taxes? a wealth tax?).These laws and rules do not exist in nature. The “free market” is created by people. The central issue is not more or less government. It’s who is government for? This is a question of power — who has it, and who doesn’t.If democracy were working as it should, government officials would make the laws and rules of the “free market” according to what most citizens need. But in our current system, the rules are made mainly by those with the power and wealth to buy the politicians, agency heads, and even the courts and the lawyers who appear before them). As income and wealth concentrate at the top, so does political leverage.As a result:— Intellectual property rights — patents, trademarks, and copyrights — have been continuously enlarged and extended. This had created windfalls for pharmaceutical, high tech, biotechnology, and entertainment companies, which can preserve their monopolies longer than ever. It also means higher prices for American consumers, including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.— Antitrust laws have been relaxed or nullified, resulting in larger profits and bigger political clout for the dominant corporations and higher prices and less leverage for workers.— Labor laws have been weakened, allowing corporations to fire workers who try to join or form unions, with the only consequence that the corporation may be required to reinstate the workers and give them back pay after long and involved proceedings.— Financial laws and regulations instituted in the Great Depression decade of the 1930s have been abandoned, allowing the largest Wall Street banks to acquire unprecedented influence over the economy.— Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations but tightened for homeowners and graduates laden with student debt. The largest banks and auto manufacturers have been bailed out of a financial crisis, but homeowners — disproportionately low-income minorities — have not.— Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations.— Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information. CEOs use stock buybacks to boost share prices and cash in their stock options.— Tax laws have created loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and private-equity funds. They also contain special favors for the oil and gas industry.— The top marginal income-tax rates have been lowered, corporate taxes have been reduced, and estate taxes on great wealth have been eliminated.— Regulations that protect health, safety, and the environment have been repealed, rolled back, riddled with exemptions, or simply unenforced. Public health has declined.— Schools in working-class and poor areas have become dependent for most of their funding on local property taxes, which aren’t enough to provide excellent schools. Hence, the notion of equal opportunity has become a bad joke.The result of this vicious cycle is a giant but hidden upward distribution of income and wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top.Another consequence is growing anger and frustration felt by people who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, accompanied by deepening cynicism about our democracy. That anger, frustration, and cynicism is corroding the moral foundation of our society. It has elected Trump, twice.Conventional but deceptive idea #3: Corporations exist only for shareholdersThe late economist Milton Friedman famously urged CEOs to give up stakeholder capitalism — under which the welfare of workers, communities, and the nation as a whole was considered in corporate decision-making, as well as shareholders. “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities?” Friedman wrote in 1970. “Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”Michael Jensen, an economics professor who arrived at the Harvard Business School in 1984, gave academic ballast to the notion that the sole purpose of the corporation should be to maximize shareholder returns. In his many papers, public lectures, and oversubscribed classes — from which generations of business school students launched careers on Wall Street and in management consulting — Jensen reasoned that hostile takeovers disciplined what he termed “inefficient firms.”Jensen forgot one big thing. He overlooked those who would bear the burden of the changes he pushed for. There have been several unfortunate consequences to Friedman and Jensen’s mistaken idea.— The rise of corporate takeovers (now often undertaken by private equity). As Jensen predicted, stockholders of targeted companies have done well. That’s because the so-called “efficiency” gains have gone to them, as well as to the raiders and top corporate executives.The costs of these maneuvers and of the obsession with maximizing share values, however, have been borne by workers who have been sacked, or whose paychecks have stagnated and whose benefits have been cut, and by communities that have been left behind.The academic conceit that workers are simply “resources” that will move to “higher valued uses” has proven to be crushingly and cruelly naïve. Human beings are not like financial resources. They do not move easily or seamlessly to different jobs and other places. They are rooted in families and communities. They have particular skills, established routines, abiding understanding of positions and roles. They depend on some degree of security, predictability, and stability. They want to be respected and valued.When “efficiency” gains go to a comparatively few people at the top, while the costs and burdens are borne by many others — as has been the case since the 1980s — the common good is not improved. It is cast to the winds.— The monopolization of America. After 1980, antitrust law all but disappeared. The new view — popularized by a Yale Law School professor, subsequently Judge Robert Bork — was that large corporate size produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America.Power was no longer at issue. This was exactly the message that America’s emerging corporate oligarchy wanted to hear. They used the façade of Bork’s pinched academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. Since the 1980s, after the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JPMorgan is the largest.Just four giant airline carriers now dominate the skies, down from 12 in 1980. American, Delta, Southwest, and United now control 80 percent of domestic seating capacity. Meanwhile, the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas has left America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft, Boeing.Three giant cable companies dominate broadband (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon). A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry (Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck).Just five giant high-tech behemoths preside over key portals and platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google), together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market.Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news, and account for almost half of all advertising dollars spent in the United States. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Nearly 90 percent of all internet searches now go through Google. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.All this consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Amazon has put most bookstores out of business and is rapidly eroding retail businesses on the nation’s Main Streets. Google employs the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over those of competitors, like Yelp.Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram killed off two potential rivals. This mega-concentration of American industry has made it harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses have been formed in the United States has been halved since 1980.In many locales workers have less choice of whom to work for, which is also holding down their wages. Corporations are imposing additional conditions on workers that further weaken their bargaining power, such as noncompete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements.Giant firms that dominate an industry also gain political power. They provide significant campaign contributions, have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers, and directly employ many voters.As a result, their CEOs’ phone calls to members of Congress are promptly returned. Items they want included in legislation are dutifully inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. They get the tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, and loan guarantees they seek. They can stop laws in their tracks. Never underestimate the monetary value of such largesse. The financial returns on political investments are among the highest in the whole system.Power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.— The near disappearance of labor unions. Starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought unions. Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire the nation’s air-traffic controllers, who went on an illegal strike, signaled to private-sector employers that fighting unions was legitimate.But it was really the wave of hostile takeovers (now often engineered by private equity funds) — the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism — that pushed employers to crush unions. Payrolls are typically 70 percent of a corporation’s costs. The most direct way to raise profits and share prices is to cut payroll costs. The first step was to bust unions.Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Previously, when management was responsible to all stakeholders, workers who went on strike typically got their jobs back as soon as a strike was settled.Shareholder capitalism changed this radically. Now, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. As Fortune magazine observed, “Managers are discovering that strikes can be broken, that the cost of breaking them is often lower than the cost of taking them, and that strike-breaking … doesn’t have to be a dirty word.”Corporations have also threatened to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so — restoring fired workers to their jobs along with back pay — is small relative to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.Corporations also mount campaigns against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states where so-called “right-to-work” laws bar unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. The Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, has extended “right-to-work” to public employees.The pressure has come from corporate raiders and their more recent incarnations, private-equity and hedge fund managers, demanding ever higher profits. Institutional investors (the managers of mutual funds, insurance funds, pension funds, endowments, and private equity funds) are just behind them, rooting them on. As power has shifted from workers to them, many of these investors and financial managers have become fabulously wealthy.Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have unionized workplaces as soon as a majority of employees signed pro-union cards.Obama didn’t fight for this. Some Democrats, threatened by groups like the Business Roundtable, wouldn’t vote for it. When the legislation was introduced, 180 business executives descended on Capitol Hill to meet with swing senators. Corporations ran $1 million worth of television ads against the bill in Nebraska alone in order to pressure one vacillating Democrat, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, to vote no. He obliged.— Hence, record-setting inequality. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporations and their shareholders has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.Most of these profits are going into higher share prices (fueled by share buybacks) and higher executive pay rather than new investment.The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with this decline in unionization. No other change in the system provides as clear a relationship.Meanwhile, and for the same reason, the rising share of total income going to the richest Americans is inversely related to the share of the nation’s workers who are unionized. The American economic pie continues to grow but most workers are getting only crumbs.Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Three researchers — Daniel Greenwald at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Martin Lettau at Berkeley, and Sydney Ludvigson at NYU — found that “from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for 92 percent of the rise in equity values,” but that from 1989 to 2017, economic growth was responsible for just 24 percent of the rise. Most of the increase in share values has come from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation.”America’s shift from farm to factory was accompanied by decades of bloody labor conflict. The shift from factory to office and other sedentary jobs created other social upheaval.The more recent power shift from workers to large corporations and their shareholders — and consequentially, the dramatic widening of inequalities of income, wealth, and political power — has happened far more quietly, but it has had a more unfortunate and more lasting consequence for the system: an angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia.Corporate profits have reached record levels and share prices have soared. This has been a boon to shareholders, especially the richest 1 percent of Americans who own about half of the value of all shares of stock, and the richest 10 percent who own over 90 percent.Top corporate executives, whose pay is linked to share prices, have reaped a bonanza. Pay on Wall Street has reached jaw-dropping heights. But most Americans have not benefited. Many have lost ground. For most, wages have been flat or have declined, their jobs have become less secure, and their pensions have been turned into 401(k)s or have disappeared altogether. Abandoned communities now litter the nation. Entire regions of the country have been left behind.Executives claim they have a “fiduciary obligation” to maximize shareholders’ returns. This argument is rubbish. It’s also tautological. It assumes that shareholders are the only people worthy of executive concern.Yet as a practical matter they are not the only parties who invest in corporations, or who bear some of the risk that the value of their investments might drop. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy.Workers who have been with a firm for years develop skills and knowledge unique to it. Others may have moved their families to take a job with the firm, buying homes in the community.The community itself may have invested in roads and other infrastructure to accommodate the corporation. When a firm abandons those workers and those communities, these stakeholders lose the value of their investments. Why should no account be taken of their stakes?Corporation after corporation began laying off workers in the 1980s without easing the often difficult transitions that followed — without providing workers with severance payments, job retraining, job search assistance, job counseling, help in selling homes whose values predictably dropped when businesses left town, or help moving to where jobs existed.They laid off large numbers of workers without aiding affected communities that were being jettisoned, or seeking to attract other businesses to make up for their losses of jobs and tax revenue, or finding other uses for the abandoned infrastructure of schools, roads, pipes, and real estate. And without giving workers and communities sufficient advanced notice so they could plan their own transitions.Absent any of this, millions of Americans were left to fend for themselves. It was a systemic change that would scar the nation for decades, contributing to rising anxiety, anger, and resentment across the land, and eventually lead to the election of Trump.As big corporations have grown larger over the last 40 years and labor unions weaker, wages have stagnated and profits have increased. It has been a direct transfer: A steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits and a shrinking portion to wages. A growing share of the total economy, likewise, has gone to profits and a smaller share to wages. The stock market has soared. Workers have slumped.Shifting Power Back to Workers: We’ve Done it BeforeThe way to end this vicious cycle is to reduce the huge accumulations of wealth that fuel it, and to get big money out of politics. But neither can can be accomplished when wealth and power are compounding at the top. It’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma.Yet such vicious cycles have been reversed before. In the early 20th century progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.The political power that flowed from concentrated economic power was a central concern of the thinkers, writers, and muckrakers of that Gilded Age, starting in the 1890s. “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” wrote Henry Demarest Lloyd in his popular 1894 book Wealth Against Commonwealth. “The flames of the new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State … and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.”The field now called economics was then called “political economy,” and the public quickly came to understand that corporate power could undermine both the economy and democracy. Recall that this was the era of the robber barons whose steel mills, oil rigs and refineries, and railroad laid the foundations for America’s industrial might, but who also squeezed out rivals who threatened their dominance, ran their own slates for office, impoverished their workers, and brazenly bribed public officials — even sending lackeys with sacks of money to be placed on the desks of pliant legislators.“What do I care about the law?” railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt famously growled. “Hain’t I got the power?” Forty-eight of the 73 men who held Cabinet posts between 1868 and 1896 either lobbied for railroads, served railroad clients, sat on railroad boards, or had relatives connected to the railroads.The public became enraged. “The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. “Which shall rule — wealth or man; which shall lead — money or intellect; who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” Reformer Mary Lease charged that “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.”Antitrust — anti-monopoly — law was viewed as the means of breaking the link between the economic and political power of the new combinations. On introducing his antitrust bill in 1890, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” Sherman’s bill passed the Senate 51 to 1, moved quickly through the House without dissent, and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on July 2, 1890.Theodore Roosevelt — condemning the “malefactors of great wealth” who were “equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil” — used Sherman’s Antitrust Act against E. H. Harriman’s giant Northern Securities Company, with which Harriman dominated transportation in the northwest. As Roosevelt later recounted, the lawsuit “served notice on everybody that it was going to be the Government, and not the Harrimans, who governed these United States.”President William Howard Taft broke up John D. Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil Trust in 1911. President Woodrow Wilson explained the danger of excessive economic and political power in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: “I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”Wisconsin’s “fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum wage law. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies.The reform movement spread. Suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote. Reformers like Jane Addams successfully pushed for laws protecting children and the public’s health. Organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.The progressive era welled up because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top was undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.In many important respects, the progressive era laid the foundation for the New Deal of the 1930s and the prosperity of the first three decades after World War II — featuring a growing middle class, a steadily more inclusive democracy, and a nation beginning to grapple with problems like poverty, inequality of opportunity, and environmental decay.Black Americans and women slowly gained footholds in the system. Mass production begat mass consumption, and mass consumption relied on steady jobs with good wages. This balance relied on strong unions, a government willing to regulate corporations, and large corporations rooted in their communities and responsible for the well-being of their employees and neighbors as well as shareholders.But over the last 40 years, the gains made then have disappeared. The opposite has occurred: The middle class has shrunk, democracy is malfunctioning, and the nation has turned its back on climate change, poverty, widening inequality, and the evils of racism and xenophobia.As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people have it only to the extent other people do not. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.The oligarchy has triumphed not because Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry and David Ellison, or Trump have directly conspired to make it happen. I doubt any of them think about the system as a whole. They have triumphed because no one paid attention to the system as a whole — to the consequences of the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant monopolistic corporations, and from regulated to unfettered finance.The choices that the American public assumed were at stake — the so-called political “right” versus “left,” Republican versus Democrat, free market versus government, socialism or capitalism — distracted us from the more fundamental questions about power: Who is gaining it? Who is losing it? For what purpose? Are we satisfied with the results?Through it all, Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the “free market,” without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid.Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable. It is not. It is a cancer on our society. It is the cause of the enshittification of America.Unless reversed, today’s concentration of wealth could soon resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Six out of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to prominent fortunes. The coming tsunami of artificial intelligence is likely to further entrench and enlarge oligarchic wealth.It is time for fundamental structural change.Share RR

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About Will Myers

I am an "Intelligent Design" writer who has the Christian faith. Part of my background is that I have a degree in physics, and have been inducted into the National Physics Honor Society. Sigma Pi Sigma, for life. My interest has lead me into metaphysics, farther into Christianity. Optimum metaphysics becomes religion.
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