They Broke the Market—Now They’re Selling You the Cage

How the same ruling class that gutted free enterprise now markets dependency as virtue

The Idealism of Youth and the Crisis of Reality

Mark Twain once said that a young man who is not a liberal has no heart, and an old man who is not a conservative has no brain. What he meant was that youth tends to be idealistic, driven by a passion for justice, while age brings pragmatism shaped by hard experience. The heart gives way to the brain, and idealism yields to the realities of the world we actually live in. With wisdom, we tend to search for workable solutions to societal problems, not to burn everything down and start over.

But today’s young Americans are increasingly ready to do just that. There is a growing belief that the American economic system has failed, particularly for the working class and especially for the young. And they are not wrong that something is deeply broken. What they believe, however, is that capitalism itself is to blame. To them, our free market system is not a ladder of opportunity but a fraudulent casino where the rich always win. They see a world where a few accumulate unimaginable wealth while millions live paycheck to paycheck. On top of that, they see a legal and cultural system they believe is stacked against people of color, especially Black men.

According to Pew polling, many young Americans believe the United States is not merely flawed but uniquely racist. They see America as a country built on slavery, expanded through genocide, and enriched by economic colonialism. Some even believe the world would be better off had Europeans never left Europe at all.

There is not much of a movement to send white Americans back to Europe, but there is a very real movement to remake America entirely. The goal is to build a new system rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion, in which production is planned around need instead of profit, and wealth is distributed according to perceived historical harm.

The Reparations Imagination

What form that system should take is still being debated. Some want full central planning and the elimination of profit. Others want to expand the welfare state so that no one is forced to work to survive, a concept often referred to as “wage slavery.” Others still demand financial reparations for America’s past.

Some of the numbers being floated are staggering.

• $10 to 17 trillion for slavery
  
  

• $17.7 trillion for people of color not covered by slavery reparations
  
  

• $35 to 50 trillion for the Indigenous population
  
  

• $4.8 to $13.4 trillion for the LGBTQ++ community, depending on whether payments are based on current self-identification or on how many people might identify that way if a $200,000 check were on the table
  
  

Altogether, these figures add up to between $67.5 and $98.1 trillion in domestic reparations alone.

But wait, there’s more! Many in the developing world also want reparations for what they consider economic colonialism. The African Commission has even attached a number to it: $777 trillion. That figure is not just for the United States but for all former colonial powers (they consider capitalism ‘economic colonialism,’ so we are included). If we apportion that based on global GDP, the U.S. share comes to about $186.5 trillion. Add that to the domestic reparations estimates and the total climbs to $284.6 trillion.

With a GDP just under $30 trillion, and especially if interest is applied, that is a debt we would never be able to pay off. And that may be the point.

A New Utopianism with Old Marxist Roots

Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin once wrote,

“The U.S. economy lives as a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no national savings of its own… The world produces while North America consumes.”

His solution was to “delink” from the global capitalist system and to seize American production for redistribution through global governance. That view is echoed by many in the anti-colonial movement and mirrored in modern social justice rhetoric.

Young Americans are often accused of embracing socialism, but that is not exactly what is happening. They are not embracing socialism in any formal or definitional sense. They are reacting to a system that has failed them. What they are rejecting is not capitalism, but a century-long mutation: a system of bureaucratic control, elite enrichment, currency debasement, and institutional betrayal that masquerades as a free market.

They are right to believe something is wrong. And being young and idealistic, they listen to those who offer bold and radical prescriptions—voices like Samir Amin, Cornel West, and Ibram X. Kendi. What they are being sold, however, is not justice. It is a cage, wrapped in moral language.

The Engineered Collapse of Free Enterprise

The irony is bitter. The very class that engineered the collapse of our free enterprise system is now offering statism as the solution. But this is not a class revolt from below. It is a consolidation of power from above. And the goal is not equity, or inclusion, or justice. The goal is control.

Let me be clear. The claim that free markets constitute economic colonialism is a lie. And the idea that people today owe reparations for the sins of those long dead, paid to others who were never personally harmed, is not justice. It is extortion. Real harm, when it exists, belongs in civil court, where specific wrongdoing can be proven and specific damages assigned. That is exactly what our legal system is for.

Hopefully it is already obvious that I reject both actual socialism and the collection of definition-challenged ideologies currently parading under that name. I am not calling for a new system. I am calling for a return to the one that worked.

Free Markets Didn’t Fail. They Were Replaced.

From 1789 to 1913, the United States experienced the fastest and broadest rise in living standards for the working poor ever recorded. This ascent did not result from central planning or heavy regulation. It occurred because government was limited, money was sound, and individuals were free to pursue opportunity. Though the nation had profound moral failings, especially in the South, where slavery suppressed per capita GDP, the overall economy thrived. In the North, upward mobility was not a myth but a measurable reality. Wages rose, productivity increased, and workers saw direct benefits from economic growth.

After the Civil War, the South began to experience similar per capita GDP growth, and wages for the working poor rose even more rapidly. During the antebellum period, nearly all economic growth occurred in the North. The South remains poorer today because of slavery - it has not yet caught up.

The foundations of American prosperity were simple and resilient. Innovation was rewarded, property rights were secure, prices were set by supply and demand, and currency was stable, tied to gold, and difficult to manipulate. Individuals who worked hard, saved money, and took responsible risks could improve their condition. This was not a utopia, but a functional system that allowed human action to operate within a consistent legal framework.

Free markets tend to perform poorly only when compared to utopias that do not exist. In practice, they have produced better outcomes than any real-world alternative.

That system began to unravel in 1913 with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act and the ratification of the 16th Amendment. These changes allowed the federal government to control the money supply and levy direct income taxes. Currency became elastic, no longer anchored to a hard standard. Monetary policy turned into a tool for political strategy. Business cycles, once natural corrections, became instruments to influence elections and shape public behavior. Inflation, once rare, became routine. Instead of lifting all boats, it quietly transferred wealth from wage earners to asset holders.

This is not necessarily an argument for returning to the gold standard, which had its own flaws. The original goal of the Federal Reserve was to smooth fluctuations in the value of gold and stabilize the currency. In theory, this would prevent recessions triggered by sudden shifts in monetary value.

In practice, however, the Federal Reserve has not provided a stable currency. Rather than preventing economic instability, it has often caused it through politicized decision-making and human error. The Great Depression was triggered in large part by Federal Reserve mismanagement, yet the crisis was used to justify even greater government control of the economy.

In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal - a sweeping set of policies that redefined the federal government’s role. What began as temporary emergency measures became permanent institutions. As Milton Friedman observed, “nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”. The government began regulating wages, setting prices, creating employment standards, and designing retirement programs. Major sectors of the economy came under bureaucratic control. Citizens were no longer free actors in an open market, but components of a centrally managed system.

The checks and balances meant to prevent this transformation failed. Courts allowed it, states stood down, and the public, desperate for relief, accepted it. The longstanding ethic of self-reliance gave way to growing dependence on federal programs. Individuals ceased to be seen as drivers of prosperity and became recipients of government intervention.

A single example highlights what was lost. Chile’s private social security system delivers returns roughly five times higher than the U.S. system. American seniors depend on Social Security, but a private model would likely have provided far greater retirement security.

President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded federal authority further through his Great Society programs. Many Democratic politicians since have tried to follow in the footsteps of Roosevelt and Johnson. Each expansion of government power, no matter how well-intentioned, took the country further from free markets and made future growth harder to achieve.

When we examine the rapid rise in the cost of health care and higher education, we find a common cause. Prices began rising faster than inflation precisely when the federal government stepped in as a provider or guarantor of those services.

This trajectory has brought us to where we are today. What we now call “capitalism” is no longer a free market. It is a managed system in which outcomes are shaped more by government agencies, central banks, and corporate lobbying than by voluntary exchange. Prices are distorted by subsidies and mandates. Competition is curtailed by regulation. Monetary value is manipulated through debt issuance and interest rate controls.

Free markets did not collapse due to inherent flaws. They were actively dismantled and replaced. The very institutions that orchestrated this shift now promote themselves as defenders of justice and equity. In reality, they have built a system that concentrates power, centralizes wealth, and undermines the working class.

The crisis we face today is not the failure of capitalism. It is the failure of those who claim to manage it.

When someone proposes a return to free markets, critics often invoke past injustices like child labor. This is misleading. During the time when child labor was common, it was widely seen as necessary. As living standards improved, parents gained the ability to send their children to school instead of factories. Child labor declined not because of government bans, but because families no longer needed it for survival.

By the time child labor laws were passed, the practice was already vanishing. In some cases, the laws caused more harm than good, depriving poor families of essential income. Like many other social problems, child labor was resolved by economic growth, not legislation. The same pattern holds true for many social improvements. Government often arrives late to the scene and takes credit for changes already underway.

The belief that freedom leads inevitably to harm is not supported by history. When markets are free and prosperity expands, people are not forced to act morally. They do so by choice.

When Unions and Government Partnered to Extract, Industry Collapsed

Post-WWII America was prosperous, but cracks were forming. Government-backed unions began making demands centered more on power than wages. Private companies were trapped. Work rules became rigid and often absurd. Wages and benefits soared without regard for long-term sustainability.

This was most evident in the UAW, which regularly targeted the weakest of the Big Three automakers. Whatever concessions it gained from one were soon matched by the others, and the costs were passed on to consumers. General Motors was the largest company in the world in 1980, but once Japanese cars gained traction in the U.S. market, the Big Three, saddled by all the legacy costs imposed by the UAW, faltered. They remain afloat today only because of repeated government bailouts.

In the public sector, the problem was even worse. FDR himself warned that public sector unions posed a threat, yet unions began negotiating with the very politicians they helped elect. Without a true counterparty, government workers extracted more from taxpayers while contributing less to economic output.

Elon Musk once quipped that asking federal workers what they do was simply a way to “confirm a pulse”. It was not far from the truth. DOGE uncovered cases of federal employees drawing full salaries while simultaneously holding private sector jobs.

By the 1970s, American industry was in decline. But instead of reforming labor practices or restoring competitiveness, the response was to offshore production, expand welfare, and inflate asset prices. The blame was conveniently placed on “capitalism.”

Bill Clinton continued the trend set by Nixon and Carter, openly stating that American labor had become too expensive. Rather than raising global labor standards to match ours, he removed trade barriers, encouraged offshoring, and flooded the domestic labor pool. Lowering wages was not a side effect. It was the goal.

These changes were made with union support, but as factories closed, private-sector union membership plummeted. Today’s UAW has more casino workers than auto workers. Most union jobs are now in the public sector.

Joe Biden has taken this further by restructuring federal employment to make it even harder to terminate underperforming workers. There are roughly three million federal employees, who now earn more on average than their private-sector counterparts. Their benefits are also more generous, with pensions that can pay up to 80 percent of their salaries for life. Including state and local levels, the number of full-time government employees exceeds 18 million.

The Real Economy Was Hollowed Out

Beginning in the 1980s, the American economy shifted decisively away from production and toward finance. The physical economy - the one that built things, employed skilled labor, and added real value - was gradually subordinated to the interests of capital markets. Manufacturing jobs vanished, not because demand disappeared, but because investment no longer prioritized domestic output. Capital went global. Labor, as always, remained local. And labor paid the price.

For a time, this transition was masked by rising nominal wages and easy credit, but wages are not wealth, and printed dollars are not value. The Consumer Price Index told one story. Purchasing power told another. When measured against real benchmarks like gold, land, oil, or housing, American wages were falling. A single income that once could buy a house, raise children, and fund retirement now often fails to cover rent and basic expenses in many parts of the country.

This was not the result of economic failure. It was the result of deliberate policy.

The Federal Reserve embraced inflation as a tool of governance, prioritizing asset prices over wage stability. Wall Street prospered, politicians complied, and the middle class shrank. Housing costs surged as institutional investors turned homes into financial instruments. Education and healthcare prices soared once federal subsidies and guarantees removed market discipline. Americans were paying more for everything while earning less in real terms.

Meanwhile, the very metrics used to define prosperity were rewritten. GDP growth came to reflect financial churn rather than productive expansion. Stock market highs were celebrated even as most Americans owned little or no equity. Unemployment rates were presented as evidence of progress, even though millions were locked into low-wage, low-mobility jobs that offered no path to ownership or wealth.

In this system, the old promise that hard work and discipline would lead to a better life has collapsed. A generation of Americans did everything they were told. They went to college, took on debt, found work, and paid their taxes, yet they cannot afford a home, raise a family, or build meaningful savings. They are renters in both a literal and figurative sense, trapped in an economy that they cannot access, let alone shape.

This is not the failure of free markets. It is the failure of a planned economy that no longer rewards productivity. It rewards access, compliance, and capital. What remains is a broken out system that inflates numbers but extracts rather than produces value.

And young people see it. They see the system failing them, and they are told to blame capitalism. But what they are living through is not capitalism at all. It is a bureaucratic economy that benefits entrenched interests and global capital while offering nothing to the working and middle classes. Their disillusionment is not baseless. It is the logical response to a rigged structure that has stripped them of opportunity, dignity, and any realistic path to ownership.

That is why so many are willing to burn the system down. What they were promised no longer exists.

Taxation, Inflation, and the Burden on the Productive Class

Roughly half of working Americans pay no federal income tax. At the same time, government spending continues to expand without restraint. Rather than matching spending to revenue through discipline or cuts, policymakers rely on monetary expansion. When tax receipts fall short, the shortfall is printed. Inflation, however, is not neutral. It is a hidden tax—one that disproportionately punishes the working poor and middle class.

Rising costs steadily erode the value of stagnant wages. Essentials like groceries, rent, and gas grow more expensive, even as official inflation statistics downplay the burden. In real terms, many workers would be better off paying modest taxes in exchange for a stable dollar. Instead, they are taxed invisibly through devaluation and told they are being helped.

This stealth taxation is compounded by the declining ratio of producers to dependents. Too many people who could be working are not. Disability rolls are swollen with questionable claims, and benefit cliffs discourage returning to work. Meanwhile, government payrolls expand. Public-sector positions are often protected from scrutiny, regardless of performance or necessity. The result is a growing imbalance: fewer private-sector workers carrying a rising cost for those who do not produce.

Some suggest that government jobs are a solution; that public employment can offer stability as private wages fall. But government jobs are not funded by value creation. They are funded by taxation. Although public employees pay taxes themselves, this merely reduces the net cost to the system. Their full compensation still rests on the shoulders of the productive class.

The burden becomes even harder to justify when public employment lacks accountability. DOGE uncovered multiple cases of federal workers receiving full-time salaries while also working in the private sector. If someone has the capacity to hold two full-time jobs, they are clearly not fulfilling the responsibilities of the one funded by taxpayers. And if those were the ones caught, many more likely escaped notice. The federal government has not released reliable data, but available evidence suggests a pattern of minimal oversight.

This dysfunction extends beyond individual abuse. Entire agencies have operated for years without delivering measurable value. In 2010, the General Services Administration spent over $820,000 on a Las Vegas conference complete with private parties, luxury accommodations, commemorative coins, and even a clown, offering no benefit to taxpayers. More recently, some COVID-era programs retained full staff long after their missions had ended, shifting focus to internal retreats and resume building.

These agencies persist not because of public need, but because bureaucracies, once established, rarely dissolve. They exist to justify their own continuation.

This is not just inefficiency. It is a structural failure. When performance is disconnected from accountability, when inflation becomes a backdoor funding mechanism, and when the administrative class becomes untouchable, government ceases to serve the people. It begins to consume them.

We are told these costs support public goods. But in practice, the working class is funding an entrenched administrative machine, one that redistributes wealth not to the vulnerable, but to itself. The people who work hardest and ask least are the ones who bear the greatest burden.

This is the real inequity in America today, and it is not a failure of free markets. It is the result of a system that insulates itself from responsibility while claiming moral superiority over the very people it exploits.

Housing: Controlled Scarcity, Institutional Ownership

Today’s housing market is no longer driven by families, builders, or local economies. It is driven by institutional investors, massive asset management firms like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. These entities do not buy homes to live in them, nor do they operate as traditional landlords. They buy to remove supply from the market, to push prices higher. They turn neighborhoods into portfolios, homes into financial instruments, and the basic human need for shelter into a permanently extractive revenue stream.

This is not capitalism in the classical sense. It is engineered scarcity, and made possible by government.

Ironically, buying houses in a housing bubble where they are the only buyers does not help their bottom line. It’s akin to getting into a bidding war with yourself at an auction, inflating the price of the very assets they are buying such that should they ever sell, it will have to be at a much lower price.

Zoning laws, climate building codes, ESG mandates, and endless regulatory barriers prevent new housing from being built quickly or affordably. In some cities, it can take years just to get approval for new development, if approval is granted at all. This bottleneck artificially limits supply in the name of “equity” or “sustainability,” while doing nothing to improve access to affordable housing. Meanwhile, the firms buying up real estate are often the same ones pressuring municipalities to adopt these regulations through ESG scoring systems and investment threats.

This is not market failure. It is market capture, and the result is a locked-out generation of young people who will never be able to afford a home, no matter how hard they work or how much they save. They will rent forever, often from faceless institutions backed by taxpayer-funded bailouts and Federal Reserve liquidity.

This will be sold as freedom. Ownership will be cast as outdated, exclusionary, and environmentally irresponsible, and those who cannot afford homes will be conditioned to believe that permanent dependence is a form of progress. They will be told they are ‘happy’ based on imaginary ‘happiness indexes’ that do not take actual happiness into account.

Energy and Climate: Banning Solutions to Preserve Control

Yes, carbon dioxide levels have increased. That is a measurable fact. But the political response to this fact has little to do with scientific integrity or real environmental concern. It is not about solving problems. It is about choosing which problems are allowed to be solved.

Carbon capture is a proven technology. Natural gas emits far less CO₂ than coal and is abundant, cheap, and reliable. Nuclear power produces virtually zero emissions and offers scalable, base-load energy capable of powering entire nations. Yet each of these solutions is ignored, vilified, and actively suppressed. Why? Because they allow for prosperity, mobility, and independence.

Instead of embracing innovation, we are offered rationing, electrification mandates, mobility restrictions, surveillance-based energy credits, and lifestyle curbs, all packaged in the language of “sustainability.” These policies do not empower people to live better, cleaner lives. They condition people to accept less: less travel, less privacy, fewer choices, smaller homes, colder winters, and an increasingly monitored existence.

This approach closely mirrors the long-standing ideology of the Club of Rome, which in the 1970s explicitly declared that humanity itself is the threat. Their solution was planned economic contraction. In their view, growth must stop, not because the environment demands it, but because free people in prosperous nations are harder to manage.

The Club of Rome is not some fringe group, but a body that has long attracted an elite circle of global planners, politicians, and technocrats who believed the world’s problems could be solved through central management and population control. It was co-founded by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish scientist Alexander King, and gained massive influence with its 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, authored by systems theorists Dennis and Donella Meadows. Among its more prominent affiliates was Mikhail Gorbachev, who aligned with the Club's goals after the fall of the Soviet Union and helped launch Earth Charter-style sustainability initiatives. Other high-profile supporters included Prince Philip, a longtime advocate of population control, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Prime Minister of Norway who chaired the UN commission that coined the term “sustainable development.” Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman and one of the architects of modern environmental policy at the UN, shared deep ties with both the Club of Rome and global carbon regulation efforts. Even David Rockefeller, though not formally a member, helped fund and promote similar global governance and sustainability models through his foundation work. More recently, figures like Anders Wijkman and Ernst von Weizsäcker have continued the Club’s mission, advocating for degrowth policies and the curtailment of individual consumption to achieve planetary management. The throughline in all of this is unmistakable: the world’s problems, according to the Club of Rome, stem from too much freedom, too much growth, and too many people.

That ideology now echoes through the halls of the World Economic Forum, where unelected global planners discuss how to balance “sustainable development” with “behavioral alignment.” These planners do not see freedom as a virtue. They see it as a variable to be controlled, a system to be governed, and, when necessary, a liability to be reduced.

The goal is not to save the planet. If it were, we would be building nuclear plants, investing in carbon capture, and exporting clean natural gas to nations still burning dung and coal. The goal is control through dependency, through fear, and through a moral framework that tells people that suffering is virtuous, submission is enlightened, and poverty is the price of moral progress.

The Administrative State Runs the Country—Not Elected Officials

The same appetite for control that limits energy independence has also hollowed out representative governance.

The United States is no longer governed by the Constitution as it was originally written. That document has been functionally replaced by an evolving body of interpretations, precedents, and bureaucratic norms. Under the “living document” doctrine, the judiciary no longer applies the law as written but instead rewrites it according to contemporary opinion. What was once a fixed framework of enumerated powers has become a flexible set of guidelines, shaped not by the people or their elected representatives, but by unelected judges, bureaucrats, and intelligence officials.

The consequences of this shift are profound. Regulatory agencies, alphabet-soup institutions like the EPA, CDC, SEC, ATF, and countless others, now write de facto legislation through rulemaking. These rules carry the weight of law, even though they are never voted on by Congress. Presidents, meanwhile, operate within invisible guardrails enforced by career officials in the intelligence community, national security apparatus, and senior civil service. If a president colors inside the lines, the machine runs. If not, the machine resists.

This is not representative government. It is bureaucratic governance under common law norms, where authority flows not from the Constitution but from precedent, policy, and inter-agency consensus. The U.S. has quietly transitioned into a post-constitutional administrative regime in which the true power lies not with those elected every two to six years, but with those who cannot be removed by any vote.

And when an elected official challenges the regime, the response is swift and coordinated. Leaks to the press, targeted investigations, bureaucratic slow-walking, and internal sabotage become the tools of enforcement. Those who step outside the boundaries set by the administrative state are not debated, but neutralized. Even the presidency itself has been reduced to a kind of senior managerial role, granted only limited latitude within a system that runs on autopilot.

In exchange for compliance, elected officials are permitted to enrich themselves. Insider trading, no-bid book deals, revolving-door consulting contracts, nonprofit laundering schemes, and dark-money campaign vehicles serve as their reward. The unspoken agreement is simple: fleece the public all you want, but do not threaten the structure. The real crime is not corruption. The real crime is disobedience.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the reality of modern governance in the United States. Power has migrated away from the people and toward a professional ruling class. This class does not campaign, does not rotate, and does not answer to voters. It answers only to itself.

And when that system fails ordinary Americans, as it now clearly has, there is no recourse through the traditional mechanisms of democracy. The elections still happen. The rituals are still performed. But the policies never change.

Because the people who actually run the country never leave.

Ideology as Camouflage for Global Control

This transition from constitutional self-governance to bureaucratic management did not happen by accident. It was seeded in elite academic institutions, theorized by cultural revolutionaries, and slowly mainstreamed into policy, education, and media. Among the most influential contributors was the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist intellectuals who sought not only to critique capitalism but to dismantle the cultural underpinnings of Western civilization itself. They recognized that economic revolution had failed in the West, so they turned their attention to the family, religion, morality, identity, and tradition, recasting them as systems of oppression rather than as stabilizing forces. Their strategy was not to destroy liberty with force, but to redefine it until the public would surrender it willingly.

These ideas filtered into university curricula, Hollywood scripts, corporate training programs, and eventually into public policy. By the 1990s, what had started as a fringe academic movement had become the moral operating system of the managerial class. Faith was dismissed as superstition. Family became a patriarchal construct. Tradition was recast as systemic exclusion. National identity was labeled xenophobic. Even biological reality, male and female, became subject to deconstruction. This cultural inversion prepared the public to abandon the very institutions that once protected liberty and rooted personal meaning.

The abandonment of ‘male’ and ‘female’ is particularly perverse, as the public KNOWS it’s not true, but that’s what makes this process so very effective: if you can get a public to believe what it knows to be false, and make them believe that their sense of virtue is based on doing so, they’ll believe anything.

Meanwhile, technocrats operationalized the vision. Bureaucrats wrote the rules. NGOs and think tanks manufactured the moral rationale. And global corporations implemented the policies. Personal liberty was gradually rebranded as selfishness. Autonomy became a form of extremism. Dependency was reimagined as virtue. And the more reliant one became on the system, the more morally righteous they appeared.

Today’s ruling class is not unified by a single ideology in the traditional sense. Some operate from a technocratic mindset. Others cloak themselves in socialism or progressivism. Still others function as corporate monopolists. What unites them is not ideology, but purpose. They share the belief that freedom is a threat to order, that human beings cannot be trusted with too much autonomy, and that complex global challenges require managed behavior rather than democratic debate. They are not trying to persuade the public. They are trying to engineer consent, using ideology not as a foundation for truth, but as camouflage for control.

The Same Class That Broke the System Now Offers the Cage

The very people who gutted America’s industrial economy, outsourced its middle class, inflated its currency, and distorted its housing market are now presenting themselves as saviors, but their so-called solutions are not meant to repair the system, but to entrench control over it.

They offer universal basic income, not as a tool for upward mobility, but as a sedative for economic displacement. As automation and offshoring eliminate jobs, and as regulatory policy locks millions out of home ownership, UBI is marketed as compassion. In reality, it is a leash. A population dependent on subsidies is a population that can be threatened, tracked, and silenced. They use the same ESG scoring systems mentioned earlier to pressure corporations into ideological compliance and to penalize businesses that don’t toe the approved narrative. This is not market discipline. It is ideological enforcement through capital control.

They push digital ID systems, tying identity to vaccine status, credit scores, and carbon consumption. These IDs are not just credentials. They are behavioral passports, granting or denying access to participation in society based on political compliance. They advance carbon quotas and personal emissions tracking, not to save the planet, but to restrict personal movement and consumption under the pretense of sustainability. And they build mass surveillance infrastructure, integrated with social media platforms, payment processors, and AI moderation tools, not to catch criminals, but to monitor thought, detect dissent, and enforce narrative discipline.

When truckers in Canada rebelled against ridiculous covid mandates (such as requiring truckers to wear masks even when driving alone in their rigs), Justin Trudeau could completely remove the protestors, as well as those providing them support, at the flick of a switch - and he did. The message was clear: if you protest, even peacefully, in a way that is effective, you can lose everything.

This is not progress. It is the construction of a digital cage.

And the language used to sell it is carefully chosen: equity, sustainability, resilience, inclusion, public health. These words are not used descriptively. They are used ritualistically to shut down discussion, silence resistance, and shame anyone who questions the underlying agenda. The goal is not to uplift the marginalized. It is to flatten the public into a manageable herd. True compassion involves empowering people. What is being offered instead is containment, and the promise that if you obey, your basic needs will be met.

The new social contract is simple: own nothing, question nothing, and stay in line and you’ll be allowed to exist.

The global leadership does not see us as rational actors, but as farm animals.

The Free Market Has No Defenders. Statism Has a Story.

Statism succeeds (politically anyway) not because it delivers results, but because it tells a compelling story. Its advocates do not need to prove outcomes. They only need to control the narrative. And they do. Every major institution in American life now speaks the same moral language: equity, inclusion, sustainability, social justice, and safety. These terms are used not to clarify, but to command, implying moral consensus and casting dissent as dangerous.

By contrast, the free market speaks in concepts no one teaches anymore: individual responsibility, voluntary exchange, price signals, property rights, sound money, and earned success. These ideas are not immoral. They are invisible. In a culture that equates structure with justice, the invisible hand is treated as cruel, while centralized authority is seen as protective.

Statism presents a clear moral framework: institutions protect the vulnerable, and control is synonymous with compassion. This narrative is repeated across universities, media, entertainment, corporate training, and even the pulpit. It trains people to believe that liberty leads to harm and that safety can only come through regulation and oversight.

Free markets don’t tell stories. They offer data. But people do not follow data. They follow meaning. And when every cultural touchstone frames freedom as dangerous and submission as virtuous, control will feel not only necessary, but righteous.

A generation raised on this narrative now associates freedom with inequality, ownership with oppression, and individualism with selfishness. Their idealism is real, but it has been redirected. The ruling class, regardless of ideological flavor, agrees on one thing: freedom must be managed, and markets must serve systems, not individuals.

In this new moral economy, liberty itself becomes a threat.

Conclusion

Mark Twain once said that a young man who is not a liberal has no heart, and an old man who is not a conservative has no brain. But what happens when the institutions entrusted with shaping young hearts deliberately bypass the mind? What happens when a generation, sincerely seeking justice, is handed a distorted worldview, not to empower them, but to keep them compliant?

Today’s youth are not mistaken in feeling betrayed. They were promised prosperity if they followed the rules: go to school, take on debt, work hard, and success would follow. Instead, they received debt, dependence, and diminishing returns. They were taught to reject capitalism without ever experiencing a truly free market. What they are rejecting is not liberty, but a system disguised as freedom but designed to suppress those who create value.

What they are being offered in response is not reform. It is control. They are given a digital leash in the name of safety, a state-approved morality in place of individual conscience, and the role of compliant subject instead of active citizen.

Despite this, their idealism remains alive. The problem is not their desire to do good. The problem is who is shaping that desire and to what end. A generation capable of rebuilding liberty is being led to destroy what remains of it. They are being led by the same people who built the system they are now told to destroy.

Socialism is advancing not because the public demanded it, but because the system increasingly relies on it. The same ruling class that dismantled free markets, weakened democratic institutions, and undermined self-reliance now needs a new story to justify continued power. To do so, they present dependency as fairness, obedience as solidarity, and economic stagnation as environmental or moral necessity.

The facts, however, remain clear: the American people did not fail. The Constitution did not fail. The market did not fail.

In speaking to our youth let me say, YOU did not fail.

They were replaced, deliberately, structurally, and by individuals far removed from public accountability.

Now, those same architects offer an alternative. It appears safe. It appears stable. But it provides no direction, no upward mobility, and no real hope. It neither lifts nor leads. It simply drifts toward decline while demanding gratitude for the illusion of safety.

There is another way. It is not experimental. It is proven. We must return to what has worked: a government bound by the Constitution and a marketplace governed by voluntary exchange and individual freedom, not by bureaucrats or central planners.

To those on the political left, I offer this thought. If you do not trust someone like Donald Trump with a particular power, then perhaps that power should not exist in the first place.

You do not have to agree. But I ask you to think seriously about where this is headed.

I hope this message brings meaning to you, but reading it alone is not enough to effect real change. This is a message that must be shared or far more than just the message will remain lost. The soul of our country is at stake.

It is not too late to build a truly better future, but it is late. The time to act is now.