Wealth Inequality in America Today

“The issue isn’t that the system is broken. It’s that it’s working exactly as designed—for the wealthy few.”

America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, where hard work pays off and each generation can rise above the last. But for millions of people, that story no longer rings true. Instead, a different reality is taking hold—one where wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than at any time since the Gilded Age, and where the vast majority of Americans are shut out of the prosperity they help create.

A Nation of Growing Gaps

Over the past four decades, wealth inequality in the United States has exploded:

• The top 1% of households now own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

• The median Black household owns about one-tenth the wealth of the median white household.

• The top 10% control over 89% of stock market wealth, while half the country owns no stock at all.

This isn’t just about billionaires flying to space or buying up islands. It’s about the cost of living outpacing wages, young people burdened with debt before their lives begin, and entire communities shut out of wealth-building opportunities like homeownership and higher education.

How Did We Get Here?

This didn’t happen by accident. Since the 1980s, a series of policy choices have tilted the playing field:

• Tax cuts for the wealthy shifted the burden onto working families.

• Union power was dismantled, lowering wages and job security.

• Public services were privatized or underfunded, turning basic needs into profit centers.

• Education and healthcare costs skyrocketed, trapping people in debt.

• Meanwhile, wealth multiplies for those who already have it, through stock gains, property appreciation, and inheritances.

The result is a society where mobility is shrinking, resentment is growing, and faith in democratic institutions is crumbling.

Inequality Is More Than Just Unfair—it’s Dangerous

When people feel like the system only works for the rich, they stop believing in the system. That’s where we are now:

• Trust in government is near historic lows.

• Many Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are.

• And increasing numbers are drawn to authoritarian promises of order, strength, and a return to greatness.

This isn’t just an economic problem. It’s a political one. And if we don’t address it, inequality could become the wedge that breaks democracy apart.

What Comes Next

Over the next six days, we’ll explore how wealth inequality has fueled authoritarianism in history, why strongman regimes fail to fix the problem, what real redistribution has looked like when it has worked, and what bold but realistic steps the U.S. can take to reverse this crisis.

Because the truth is: inequality is not inevitable. It’s a choice. And so is what we do about it.

A Moral Marketplace: How We Move Forward

Adam Smith trusted in the power of markets. But more importantly, he trusted in the moral imagination of human beings.

He believed that sympathy, fairness, and a sense of justice would guide us — individually and collectively — to create societies that could thrive.

We have forgotten part of that vision.
But we can remember it.
We can rebuild it.

Because a better future doesn’t require us to invent something new. It requires us to complete the story we left unfinished.

A Moral Marketplace Is Possible

A market system grounded in morality isn’t just a dream. It’s a real, practical goal — one that starts with reconnecting freedom and responsibility.

In a moral marketplace:

• Businesses compete fairly, not by rigging the rules.

• Workers are treated with dignity, not as disposable inputs.

• Communities are partners in prosperity, not collateral damage.

• Public goods are seen as essential investments, not inconvenient costs.

• Economic success is measured not just by profits, but by how widely those profits lift lives.

We don’t have to accept a system where exploitation is inevitable. We can create a system where ambition, ingenuity, and compassion reinforce each other.

Practical Steps Toward a Moral Marketplace

Restoring the balance won’t happen overnight. But it starts with choices — policies, business models, cultural shifts — that move us toward Smith’s full vision.

Here are some ways forward:

Protect Real Competition

• Enforce antitrust laws to break up monopolies and cartels.

• Encourage innovation by ensuring new entrants can challenge established giants.

• Prevent financial engineering that rewards consolidation over creativity.

Strengthen Worker Rights and Dignity

• Support fair wages, safe conditions, and bargaining rights.

• Recognize workers as partners in prosperity, not obstacles to efficiency.

• Promote ownership models that share the rewards of success more broadly (like employee ownership plans and cooperatives).

Invest in Public Goods

• Recommit to universal access to education, healthcare, and infrastructure.

• Level the playing field so that ambition and talent — not birth or privilege — determine opportunity.

Reward Value Creation, Not Value Extraction

• Reform tax systems to favor long-term investment over short-term speculation.

• Discourage business models that profit from cutting corners, gutting companies, or exploiting loopholes.

Hold Power Accountable

• Strengthen transparency requirements for corporations and political donations.

• Rebuild independent institutions that serve the public, not private interests.

Foster a Culture of Ethical Business Leadership

• Teach business ethics as essential, not optional.

• Celebrate leaders who act as stewards of prosperity, not just hunters of profit.

Change Is Already Happening — Quietly, Powerfully

Across the world, people are already pushing back against the idea that markets must be amoral to succeed.

• Social enterprises combine profit with mission.

• B Corporations commit legally to balancing profit and public good.

• Impact investing channels capital toward sustainable, ethical businesses.

• Worker cooperatives are reclaiming ownership for those who build value every day.

The seeds are already planted.
What’s needed now is sunlight, water, and time — and the collective belief that something better is not only possible, but necessary.

Reclaiming Smith’s True Legacy

Adam Smith never imagined a perfect world. He knew human beings were flawed, passionate, ambitious.

But he also knew we were capable of sympathy, fairness, and wisdom.

He believed that when we balance freedom with morality, competition with justice, self-interest with public good — we could create prosperity that uplifts whole societies, not just a fortunate few.

That is the unfinished work we inherit.
That is the promise we can still fulfill.

The Final Word

The future of markets — and the future of our societies — is not written in stone. It’s shaped every day by the choices we make.

Will we continue to separate economics from ethics, and watch trust, opportunity, and resilience erode? Or will we restore the balance Smith envisioned, and build markets that serve not only the wealthy, but all of humanity?

The choice is ours.
The work is ours.

And the future can still be worthy of our highest hopes.

Thank you for joining me for this series.

Together, we can finish the story Adam Smith started — and build something truly lasting.

Restoring the Balance: Why Morality Matters to Markets

The story we’ve traced so far is not a story of inevitable decline. It’s a story of choices — choices made, and choices still open to us.

We lost sight of Adam Smith’s full vision. But we can recover it.

And if we want markets that truly serve humanity — not just the privileged few — we must.

Because morality is not a luxury we add to an economy once it succeeds. It’s the foundation that allows success to be shared, sustained, and worthy.

Markets Were Always Meant to Be Moral

Adam Smith’s vision was never a free-for-all. It was freedom disciplined by conscience.

He understood that ambition, energy, and innovation are powerful — but dangerous without the guardrails of justice, trust, and mutual respect.

Smith believed:

• Markets work best when competition is real and fair

• Prosperity thrives when individuals feel accountable to one another

• Justice is not a “nice to have” — it’s the first duty of a functioning society

“Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.”

— The Theory of Moral Sentiments, II.ii.3

Freedom without morality doesn’t create prosperity. It creates instability, resentment, and collapse.

True markets — Smith’s markets — require us to remember our responsibilities to one another, not just our rights.

What Happens When Morality is Missing?

When we strip morality away from markets, we see the familiar consequences:

• Trust erodes. People stop believing the system is fair.

• Power concentrates. Markets that were meant to be open tilt toward monopolies and cronyism.

• Innovation slows. Risk-taking becomes extractive rather than creative.

• Social cohesion frays. Inequality deepens, anger rises, and society becomes vulnerable to extremism.

In a world without the moral sentiments Smith described, the invisible hand doesn’t guide us toward the common good. It clenches into a fist.

Why Morality Isn’t Optional — It’s Essential

Restoring morality to markets is not about nostalgia for a golden age that never truly existed. It’s about understanding a deeper truth:

We cannot separate economics from ethics.

When markets are fair, when opportunity is real, when dignity is honored, the results are not just morally satisfying — they are economically stronger.

Healthy societies create healthy economies.
Respected workers build better businesses.
Trusted institutions enable more innovation and investment.
Shared prosperity strengthens the very engine of growth.

Morality is not a constraint on prosperity.
It is a condition of prosperity.

What Restoring Balance Looks Like

Bringing Smith’s full vision back into focus would mean transforming key aspects of modern capitalism:

• Encouraging genuine competition and breaking up monopolistic power

• Investing in public goods — education, healthcare, infrastructure — so more people can participate

• Rebuilding worker dignity and bargaining power

• Enforcing justice — not just for the poor and powerless, but also for the wealthy and influential

• Fostering a culture of business ethics, not just legal compliance

It’s about designing systems that reward creation over extraction, stewardship over short-termism, fairness over favoritism.

It’s about expecting better — from our leaders, our institutions, and ourselves.

The Good News: We Are Not Starting from Scratch

The forces Adam Smith trusted — sympathy, justice, imagination — are still within us.

Every day, around the world, people build businesses that treat workers with respect.
Entrepreneurs create value not by exploiting, but by innovating. Communities organize to demand fairer systems.
Consumers reward companies that show real responsibility.

We have more tools today than Smith ever dreamed of:

• Faster communication

• Broader education

• Globalized networks of ideas and solidarity

If we choose to remember the full Smith — not just the economic architect, but the moral philosopher — we have everything we need to build a better future.

Moving Forward

Restoring the balance between markets and morality is not about abandoning capitalism. It’s about completing it.

It’s about reclaiming the promise Smith saw: A world where individual ambition and public good are not enemies — but allies.

Where prosperity is not hoarded — but shared.
Where markets are free — and fair.
Where dignity, justice, and opportunity walk hand in hand.

In the final post of this series, we’ll explore practical steps — large and small — that could help move us toward a moral marketplace that works for all.

Because the future isn’t written yet. And we are the ones who will write it.

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Tomorrow

A Moral Marketplace: How We Move Forward

When Markets Turn Predatory: Private Equity and the Broken Promises of Capitalism

Adam Smith believed that free markets, anchored by morality and competition, could create prosperity for all.

But he also knew that where moral sentiment and justice are weak, markets can be twisted into tools of extraction, exploitation, and entrenchment.

Today, one of the clearest examples of this corruption is found in a powerful force reshaping modern capitalism: private equity.

Private Equity: The Business of Extraction

In theory, private equity is simple: A firm buys a company, improves it, and sells it for a profit.

In practice, it often looks very different.

A common private equity playbook works like this:

• Borrow heavily to buy a company (using the company’s own assets as collateral)

• Load the company with debt, making it financially fragile

• Cut costs aggressively — often through layoffs, slashed benefits, or service cuts

• Pay themselves fees regardless of company performance

• Sell the company — or leave it bankrupt — after extracting as much value as possible

The goal is not to build a better business.
The goal is to maximize short-term profits for the investors, regardless of the long-term consequences.

Jobs, communities, customers — even the survival of the company itself — are secondary.

This is not the creative, dynamic capitalism Adam Smith envisioned.

This is parasitic behavior: taking without creating.

The Collapse of Real Competition

Private equity has also fueled market concentration. By rolling up competitors and consolidating industries, firms reduce competition — often leading to:

• Higher prices for consumers

• Worse service

• Lower wages for workers

Smith warned relentlessly about the dangers of monopolies and collusion:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together… but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

— The Wealth of Nations, I.x.c.27

When a handful of private firms control entire sectors — from healthcare to housing to retail — real competition dies.
The invisible hand is shackled.
The public pays the price.

Rent-Seeking Disguised as Investment

True investment creates value: new products, new jobs, new wealth for society.

Rent-seeking extracts value from existing structures without creating anything new.

Private equity, in its predatory forms, has mastered the art of rent-seeking:

• Charging management fees whether companies succeed or fail

• Stripping real estate from businesses and selling it off for a quick cash boost

• Declaring dividends to themselves funded by debt, not profits

These practices are defended in the language of capitalism — “efficiency,” “risk-taking,” “market discipline” — but they bear little resemblance to the productive competition Smith championed.

Smith valued self-interest that served society through competition — not self-interest that hollowed society out from the inside.

The Human Cost

The victims of predatory private equity aren’t abstract balance sheets. They are real people.

• Workers laid off with no safety net.

• Communities losing essential services.

• Consumers paying more for worse goods.

• Pension funds raided and drained.

• Entire industries destabilized.

Smith argued that a flourishing economy depends on a stable, just society. When companies treat human beings as disposable, they are not creating wealth — they are cannibalizing it.

This Is Not Capitalism — It’s Market Plundering

If Adam Smith were alive today, he would likely view much of modern private equity with deep skepticism, if not outright condemnation.

He would see:

• Freedom distorted into license

• Competition strangled by consolidation

• Wealth hoarded by a few at the expense of the many

• Justice — the first duty of society — undermined

Markets can serve humanity.
Or markets can devour humanity.

Without the moral sentiments, without the impartial spectator, without justice, there is no invisible hand guiding us toward the public good.

There is only the visible claw of greed.

A Moment of Reckoning

Understanding how markets have gone astray is not about nostalgia. It’s about recognizing that the foundation Smith imagined is still possible — but only if we rebuild the balance between freedom and morality.

In the next post, we’ll step back and look at the bigger picture: Why restoring Adam Smith’s full vision isn’t just morally right — it’s economically necessary.

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Tomorrow

Restoring the Balance: Why Morality Matters to Markets

The Great Forgetting: How Modern Capitalism Lost Its Moral Compass

Adam Smith gave us a vision of free markets anchored in morality, justice, and public trust.

For a time, the world tried — imperfectly, unevenly — to walk that path.

But over the last two centuries, something changed.
Gradually at first. Then faster.
Until, today, we barely recognize the balance Smith worked so hard to describe.

We remembered the freedom.
We forgot the morality.
We celebrated self-interest.
We abandoned the impartial spectator.

In chasing the wealth of nations, we lost sight of the moral sentiments that made that wealth sustainable — and worth having.

The Selective Reading of Adam Smith

In the 19th and 20th centuries, as industrialization spread and new economic theories emerged, Adam Smith’s name became a banner for the champions of free markets.

But too often, people invoked Smith’s ideas selectively — quoting the invisible hand, while ignoring the moral hand Smith believed must guide it.

• Self-interest was celebrated.

• Moral restraint was treated as optional.

• Competition was praised, but collusion and monopoly were quietly tolerated when profitable.

Smith’s vision was not of a marketplace free from responsibility. It was of a marketplace embedded in a society of conscience.

By forgetting that, we laid the groundwork for many of the challenges we face today.

Freedom Without Responsibility

In modern capitalist economies, freedom became the ultimate good — often at the expense of responsibility.

Markets were deregulated, justified by the belief that the invisible hand would naturally sort everything out. Corporations were granted more rights, with fewer obligations to the public. Finance grew increasingly detached from real goods, real services, and real communities.

But Smith never imagined a world where companies could become “too big to fail.” He never envisioned an economy where speculation could outpace production by orders of magnitude.

He warned of the very dangers that unchecked markets would create:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [the merchants and manufacturers] ought always to be listened to with great precaution.”

— The Wealth of Nations, I.xi.p.10

Smith understood that those with wealth and power would often conspire against the public — not because they were evil, but because it was in their interest to do so.

That’s why strong institutions and a vigilant public were necessary.

Freedom alone was never enough.

The Rise of Rent-Seeking and Monopolies

Another forgotten part of Smith’s warning was his hatred of rent-seeking — the practice of extracting wealth without creating new value.

Today, rent-seeking dominates entire sectors:

• Financial firms profiting from speculation rather than investment

• Private equity stripping companies for parts rather than building them

• Tech monopolies using their size to stifle competition rather than innovate

These behaviors do not serve the common good. They serve a narrow private interest, at society’s expense.

And yet, they are often defended in Smith’s name — a bitter irony, given that he would likely have opposed them fiercely.

The Human Cost of the Great Forgetting

The consequences of losing Smith’s moral compass are not just economic. They are deeply human.

• Workers treated as disposable assets, not partners in production.

• Communities hollowed out by waves of offshoring, consolidation, and financialization.

• Public trust eroded, as people increasingly see the economy as rigged against them.

• Politics captured by the very wealthy, creating policies that deepen inequality.

When the moral sentiments are stripped away from economic life, we are left with markets that serve the few, while asking the many to bear the cost.

Not What Smith Wanted — or Imagined

Smith’s dream was not a market that rewarded greed without restraint. It was a society where individual ambition was harmonized with public virtue, where free exchange and free conscience worked together to lift all.

We have lost that balance.

We have lost the heart of Smith’s vision.

But the good news is: We can find it again.

In the next post, we’ll look closely at one of the clearest betrayals of Smith’s ideals — how private equity, monopolies, and financial engineering have turned markets into tools of extraction rather than creation. And we’ll ask: What would Adam Smith say about the capitalism of today?

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Tomorrow

When Markets Turn Predatory: Private Equity and the Broken Promises of Capitalism

The Wealth of Nations: Freedom, Competition, and Prosperity

After years of thinking deeply about human morality, Adam Smith turned his attention to another question: How do societies grow wealthy?

By the time The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, Smith had spent a lifetime studying not only philosophy, but law, politics, and commerce. He was deeply familiar with the systems that shaped people’s lives — and the systems that trapped them.

And he was convinced that the old ways weren’t working.

Breaking Free from the Mercantile System

At the time Smith was writing, most governments tightly controlled trade. They imposed heavy tariffs, protected monopolies, and saw the economy as a zero-sum game: one nation’s gain was another’s loss.

Smith rejected this vision.

He argued that when individuals were free to pursue their own interests — within a framework of justice — they would unintentionally contribute to the wealth of society as a whole.

This was the revolutionary idea behind the famous metaphor of the invisible hand.

Not magic. Not chaos. But a complex, decentralized dance of human effort and ingenuity — coordinated not by kings or ministers, but by market forces.

“By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

— The Wealth of Nations, IV.ii.9

Freedom, properly channeled, could unleash creativity, productivity, and shared prosperity.

The Power of the Division of Labor

One of Smith’s most important insights was simple but profound: Specialization makes people — and societies — vastly more productive.

He famously described a pin factory, where breaking down production into distinct, specialized tasks allowed workers to make far more pins together than they ever could alone.

The principle applied far beyond pins. It explained how entire economies could grow rapidly when individuals focused on what they did best and traded for what they needed.

Division of labor, combined with free exchange, allowed human beings to achieve levels of abundance unimaginable in previous centuries.

Competition: The True Engine of Progress

Smith believed that competition was essential to keeping markets healthy.

When businesses must compete for customers, they must:

• Offer better products

• Lower prices

• Innovate faster

• Treat people better (or risk losing their trust)

Left unchecked, businesses would often conspire to rig prices, block competitors, or exploit workers — exactly the kinds of behaviors Smith warned against.

He praised markets not because businessmen were saints, but because competition forces businesses to serve the public interest whether they want to or not.

“The interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

— The Wealth of Nations, IV.viii.49

In other words: the market is for the people, not the corporations.

The Proper Role of Government

Despite his reputation as a champion of free markets, Smith believed governments had critical duties:

• Protecting justice (enforcing contracts, preventing fraud and violence)

• Building public infrastructure (roads, bridges, harbors — things private businesses wouldn’t build themselves)

• Providing education (to help individuals fully participate in economic life)

Smith understood that free markets did not exist in a vacuum. They needed laws, institutions, and public goods to function well.

He was no anarchist. He believed in a limited but active government — one that protected freedom and ensured fairness.

Self-Interest, but Not Selfishness

Smith’s economic theory recognized the power of self-interest — the desire to improve one’s own condition. But it was never meant to justify greed without restraint.

The self-interest Smith described was bounded by:

• The inner voice of the impartial spectator (moral conscience)

• The outer rules of justice (government and law)

• The competitive pressure of free markets (social discipline)

When these forces worked together, they could create extraordinary prosperity. When any of them was weakened or ignored, the system could easily slide into exploitation and injustice.

The Bigger Picture

Adam Smith’s vision in The Wealth of Nations was hopeful — but it was never naive.

He understood that markets could empower human beings. He also understood that they needed to be nurtured and restrained by moral and institutional forces.

Prosperity wasn’t guaranteed.
It depended on balance.

In the next post, we’ll explore how modern capitalism — by forgetting Smith’s moral and institutional warnings — has lost that balance, and what it has cost us.

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Tomorrow

The Great Forgetting: How Modern Capitalism Lost Its Moral Compass

The Moral Heart: Exploring The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Before Adam Smith ever wrote about markets, he wrote about something much closer to home: our hearts.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith tackled the biggest question of all:
What holds human society together?

It’s not wealth.
It’s not laws.
It’s not power.

It’s something far more delicate — and far more powerful.
Our capacity to care about each other.

Sympathy: The Foundation of Society

Smith believed that human beings are naturally equipped with sympathy — what we today might call empathy. We have the ability to imagine what others feel, to share in their joys and sorrows, to see the world through their eyes.

This sympathy, Smith argued, is not perfect.
We don’t feel it equally toward everyone.
It’s stronger for those close to us, weaker for distant strangers.
But it’s there, always — a vital thread connecting us to one another.

Without it, there could be no trust, no cooperation, no society at all.

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others.”

— The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1

In Smith’s view, morality doesn’t come from rigid external rules. It springs up organically from our sympathy, our desire to be loved, and our wish to deserve that love.

The Impartial Spectator: Our Inner Moral Compass

Smith introduced a brilliant idea:
Inside each of us, there lives an imagined figure — the impartial spectator.

When we make decisions, when we reflect on our actions, we imagine how a fair and reasonable observer would judge us. Not how our friends or enemies might flatter or condemn us, but how a truly unbiased, moral being would see us.

The impartial spectator helps us check our passions.
It encourages us to act justly even when it’s inconvenient.
It helps us strive to be the kind of person we would respect.

Without this inner voice, Smith believed, we would be lost in selfishness and chaos.

“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”

— The Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.ii.1

We don’t just want admiration.
We want to deserve admiration.
That’s the real anchor of human morality.

Justice: The Bedrock of Civilization

Smith made a crucial distinction:
Love and generosity are beautiful.
But society does not depend on everyone being saints.

At minimum, society requires justice — a shared agreement not to harm one another.

Justice, for Smith, was the first and most essential virtue of a stable society. Without it, no economy, no government, no community could survive.

Governments, in Smith’s view, existed first and foremost to protect justice: to prevent violence, fraud, and oppression.

Freedom and prosperity could only flourish on the solid ground of justice.

The Temptation of Wealth and Status

Smith also warned of a powerful and dangerous human tendency:
Our admiration for the rich and powerful, even when they are undeserving.

We are drawn to success.
We are dazzled by wealth.
And in that dazzlement, we sometimes confuse material fortune with moral worth.

Smith worried that this confusion could rot societies from within — Elevating the undeserving while neglecting the truly virtuous.

Sound familiar?

“The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers of wealth and greatness.”

— The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.iii.3

A Moral Vision for Humanity

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith painted a vision of humanity as naturally social, emotional, and moral.
Yes, we act in our own self-interest.
But we also crave connection, fairness, and self-respect.

For Smith, morality was not a fragile add-on to human life. It was the foundation.

Without sympathy, without conscience, without justice, there could be no trust.
Without trust, there could be no society.
And without society, there could be no markets — no wealth, no freedom, no future.

Setting the Stage

When Smith turned his attention to economics later in The Wealth of Nations, he built on this moral foundation.

He wasn’t advocating selfishness without limits.
He was proposing a system where free individuals, guided by internal moral compasses and protected by laws of justice, could create prosperity together.

He believed freedom and morality needed to walk hand in hand.

In the next post, we’ll explore the ideas in The Wealth of Nations — and see how Smith’s vision for economic life flowed naturally from his understanding of human morality.

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Tomorrow

The Wealth of Nations: Freedom, Competition, and Prosperity

Meet the Real Adam Smith

When most people hear the name Adam Smith, one image pops up almost instantly:

The father of capitalism.

Maybe you think of the invisible hand, gently guiding markets.

Maybe you think of self-interest, and the idea that by pursuing our own gain, we somehow benefit society.

Maybe you picture a wise old economist laying down the foundations for free markets, open competition, and the world we know today.

There’s just one problem:

That’s only half the story.

And without the other half, the half we’ve largely forgotten, we risk misunderstanding not only Smith — but the entire system that shapes our lives.

The Other Book — and the Other Smith

Long before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he had already spent decades thinking about a deeper question:

What makes human society even possible in the first place?

The result was a different masterpiece: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

In it, Smith explored something that today’s headlines often seem to forget:

That human beings are not just rational calculators chasing profit.
We are emotional, social, empathetic creatures.
We care about fairness. We are guided by a sense of justice.
We judge our own actions — and the actions of others — not just by outcomes, but by what feels right.

Before Smith talked about free markets, he talked about moral instincts.
About sympathy. About the invisible forces of conscience that bind us together.

He didn’t see self-interest and morality as opposites.
He saw them as forces that had to be kept in balance.

Freedom Was Never Meant to Stand Alone

When Smith later wrote The Wealth of Nations, he built on this moral foundation. He believed that free markets, powered by individuals pursuing their goals, could unleash prosperity.

But he assumed that people would still be guided by their conscience — by what he called the “impartial spectator” within each of us.
He assumed that governments would enforce justice, protect competition, and invest in the public good.
He assumed that markets would operate within a larger moral society.

Smith knew that freedom without morality would not lead to prosperity.
It would lead to corruption, concentration of power, exploitation — the very things he warned about.

What We Forgot — and Why It Matters Now

Over the last two centuries, something critical happened:
We remembered the markets.
We forgot the morality.

We remembered the invisible hand.
We forgot the moral compass that guided it.

Today, we see the consequences all around us:

• Rising inequality

• Corporate monopolies

• Workers treated as disposable

• Short-term profits prioritized over long-term health

This isn’t the capitalism Adam Smith envisioned.
This is capitalism without its conscience.

Reclaiming the Full Vision

This series is about finding our way back.

Over the next seven posts, we’ll walk through:

• The moral insights of The Theory of Moral Sentiments

• The economic ideas of The Wealth of Nations

• How modern capitalism diverged from Smith’s true vision

• And most importantly, how we can restore the lost balance between morality and markets — for a healthier, fairer, and more resilient future.

Smith understood that markets and morality are not enemies.
They are partners.

If we want an economy that truly works for people — all people — we have to finish reading Adam Smith. Not just the parts that serve narrow interests.
The whole story.

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Tomorrow

The Moral Heart: Exploring The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Two Crises, One Cause

And How We Rebuild

The heist wasn’t an accident.
And it wasn’t isolated.

It wasn’t just Toys R Us.
It wasn’t just JoAnn Fabrics.
It wasn’t just one hospital, one town, one lost job, one empty mall.

It was — and is — a system.
A machine designed to strip-mine value out of the real economy while protecting and enriching the people already at the top.

Private equity didn’t invent this machine.
They simply became its most efficient operators.

The Two Crises Are One Crisis

This week, in False Promises, we mapped how political corruption, short-term thinking, and false solutions are actively weakening America’s global standing.

Here, in The Private Equity Heist, we mapped how financial predation and corporate looting are hollowing out America’s internal strength — its businesses, its workers, its communities.

They are not separate problems.
They are symptoms of the same disease.

A country led by liars and grifters, serving liars and grifters, at the expense of everyone else.

• Where the debts are never really paid — because the people who caused them are never the ones paying.

• Where success is measured not by what you build, but how much you can grab before the roof caves in.

• Where the public is left clinging to slogans and scapegoats while the real looters slip away smiling.

What We Lost — and What We Could Still Save

We lost businesses that were part of the fabric of American life.
We lost good jobs, stable careers, pensions, community institutions.

But more than anything, we lost trust.

Trust that the system would reward honest work.
Trust that building something real would be safer than looting something fragile.
Trust that if you played by the rules, you wouldn’t be thrown away when someone else wanted a bigger bonus.

Rebuilding that trust will be harder than passing any single law.

But it’s not impossible.

How We Rebuild

Expose the Heist

Make the system visible.
Call out the looting for what it is — not “bad management,” not “market forces,” but deliberate extraction.

Rein in Predators

Regulate leveraged buyouts.
Ban dividend recapitalizations.
Force real accountability onto private equity owners.

Strengthen Labor

Unions, worker co-ops, and employee ownership aren’t side issues — they’re bulwarks against looters.

Reclaim Public Investment

Stop handing public money to predatory firms through pension funds, subsidies, and tax breaks.
Invest in businesses that invest in people.

Refuse the False Choices

We don’t have to choose between corruption and collapse.
We can demand an economy — and a government — that rewards building, not looting.

The heist isn’t over.

But neither is the story.

If enough of us are willing to look clearly at what happened, name the culprits, and fight for something better, we don’t just stop the next heist.

We start rebuilding something that was stolen from us long ago:
an economy, a democracy, and a future worth trusting again.

Choosing Our Future

Why We Must Reject the False Promises of Trump’s Second Term

After six posts, the pattern is undeniable: the policies Donald Trump promises for his second term aren’t bold new ideas. They are recycled failures — tested in states like Kansas and Texas, seen abroad in places like El Salvador and Britain, and proven to hurt the very people they claim to help.

Behind the slogans about “making America great” is a grim reality:

• Economic nationalism has raised prices, hurt farmers, and cost manufacturing jobs.

• Immigration crackdowns have crippled industries and driven up consumer costs.

• Authoritarian law-and-order tactics have undermined civil rights and judicial independence.

• Deregulation and privatization have left Americans more vulnerable to disaster and inequality.

• Environmental rollbacks have made our communities less safe and forfeited leadership in the industries of the future.

• Empty debt-cutting promises have only grown the national debt, leaving taxpayers holding the bill.

Each of these failures springs from the same deeper problem:

A fundamental misunderstanding of what truly makes a nation strong.

Strength doesn’t come from isolating ourselves, deporting our neighbors, cutting vital services, or gutting our institutions.

Strength comes from building — trust, infrastructure, education, innovation, opportunity.

Strength comes from investing — in people, communities, and the resilience needed for the challenges of tomorrow.

The High Stakes of 2025 and Beyond

The global order that helped ensure American prosperity for generations — Pax Americana — was built on trust, stability, and the rule of law. Trump’s second-term agenda threatens to tear that down:

• By destabilizing trade and pushing allies away.

• By undermining the judiciary and punishing dissent.

• By allowing infrastructure, public health, and education to wither.

America’s strength has never come from walls or tariffs. It has come from being a beacon of opportunity, freedom, and reliability — at home and abroad.

If we abandon that in favor of fear, cruelty, and short-term political wins, the damage may be irreparable.

The Choice Ahead

This is not just a choice about Donald Trump.

It’s a choice about the kind of country we want to live in — and the kind of future we want to leave to our children.

Do we cling to failed ideas that have already cost us so much?

Or do we move forward, with honest leadership, smarter policy, and a renewed commitment to what made America strong in the first place?

The next chapter isn’t written yet.

But it will be — by the choices we make today.

The Getaway

Who Profited and How We Fight Back

The vaults were emptied.
The alarms stayed silent.
And the thieves walked right out the front door — smiling, shaking hands, cashing their bonuses.

That’s the real genius of the private equity heist.

It wasn’t just that they stole from America’s businesses, workers, and communities.
It’s that they convinced everyone else to clean up the mess they left behind.

The System That Made It Possible

It wasn’t just one firm.
Or one CEO.
Or one unlucky company.

The entire financial system was rigged to make the heist possible — and to reward the looters.

Private Equity Firms

They operate within a system that incentivizes extraction over investment — because stripping assets and maximizing short-term profits delivers faster, bigger returns than building sustainable businesses.

Wall Street Banks

They package, finance, and profit from the debt that makes these buyouts possible — collecting their fees up front, no matter how many companies collapse later.

Politicians and Regulators

Decades of deregulation, tax breaks, and weak oversight have created a playground where financial engineers can do legally what used to require fraud.

Institutional Investors

Pension funds, university endowments, and wealth managers pour billions into private equity funds, chasing returns — even when those returns come from hollowing out the real economy.

In this system, it doesn’t matter if a company succeeds.
It doesn’t matter if workers are laid off, if towns are gutted, if entire industries are destroyed.
What matters is that the people at the top get paid first.

The Victims Are Always the Same

• Workers, stripped of jobs, pensions, and dignity.

• Communities, hollowed out and abandoned.

• Customers, left with fewer choices and worse service.

• Taxpayers, forced to clean up the wreckage.

This isn’t a story of individual bad actors.
It’s a story of a system that rewards looting — and punishes anyone who tries to build something lasting.

The Grift Continues

Today, in False Promises, we explored The Debt Delusion — how political leaders sell the fantasy that debt can be made to disappear without consequences.

Private equity runs on the same delusion.

The debt they create isn’t designed to be paid off.
It’s designed to be someone else’s problem.

They front-load the profits, dump the risks, and walk away before the roof caves in.

When the collapse comes, it’s always the workers, the communities, and the taxpayers who are left trying to patch the holes — while the looters move on to their next “investment opportunity.”

This isn’t bad luck.
It’s not incompetence.
It’s a business model.
It’s the model.

Fighting Back

The good news is: the heist isn’t inevitable.
And the thieves aren’t invincible.

Some ways to fight back:

• Regulate leveraged buyouts — limit the amount of debt that can be loaded onto a company.

• Ban dividend recapitalizations — prevent owners from extracting cash through forced debt.

• Hold PE firms accountable — make them liable for the debts and pensions they destroy.

• Support worker ownership models — help employees, not financiers, buy and run companies.

• Divest public pension funds — pressure state and city pensions to pull their investments out of predatory PE firms.

• Shine a spotlight — make sure every community knows the real story behind every store closure, hospital bankruptcy, or mass layoff.

This isn’t about “saving capitalism” or “hating capitalism.”

It’s about saving the parts that serve people — and smashing the parts that serve only parasites.

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Coming up tomorrow:

Final Reflection: Two Crises, One Cause — and How We Rebuild.

(Because private equity’s heist and America’s political collapse aren’t separate stories. They’re chapters in the same book — and it’s time we started writing a different ending.)

The Debt Delusion

How Trump’s “Waste and Fraud” Promises Will Make Things Worse

Donald Trump has a simple-sounding solution to America’s rising debt: cut “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

It’s a line that plays well on campaign stages. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate waste? Who supports fraud?

But in reality, this promise is pure political theater — and a dangerous distraction from the real drivers of America’s fiscal challenges. Worse, Trump’s actual policies have already shown that cutting “waste” isn’t enough — and that his fiscal plans are more likely to grow the national debt, not shrink it.

The Myth of Easy Savings

Every politician talks about rooting out government inefficiency. But experts across the political spectrum agree:

• “Waste, fraud, and abuse” account for only a tiny fraction of federal spending.

• Even aggressive anti-fraud efforts would barely move the needle on the $34+ trillion national debt.

• The vast majority of the federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, and interest on the debt — not duplicative office supplies or misfiled paperwork.

You can’t fix the federal budget with the equivalent of finding pennies in the couch cushions.

Hard choices — about taxes, healthcare costs, defense spending, and entitlement reform — are where the real math happens. And those are the choices Trump and his allies continue to dodge.

Trump’s First-Term Record: Bigger Deficits, Higher Debt

In 2016, Trump vowed not only to eliminate the deficit but to wipe out the national debt entirely within eight years.

Instead:

• By the end of his first three years (pre-COVID), the national debt had increased by 16%.

• The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — Trump’s signature legislation — added $1.9 trillion to the debt over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

• Even during strong economic growth, the annual federal deficit ballooned to nearly $1 trillion by 2019 — a dangerous sign, since deficits are supposed to shrink during good times.

The Trump tax cuts were sold as self-financing through higher growth. That growth bump never materialized. Instead, tax revenue fell, and the government borrowed more.

Trump didn’t tame the debt. He accelerated it.

The Real Impact of “Cutting Waste”

When politicians do get serious about budget cuts, it’s rarely actual waste that gets slashed. It’s programs that help working Americans:

• Medicaid oversight programs that detect billing fraud? Cut.

• IRS enforcement that catches wealthy tax cheats? Cut.

• Education, housing, and food security programs? Cut.

Meanwhile, defense spending (which accounts for more than half of discretionary spending) often increases — and Trump’s 2025 budget proposals reportedly plan major hikes【source: Axios】.

In short:

• “Cutting waste” often means hurting the most vulnerable, while leaving massive expenditures untouched.

• It doesn’t address the structural imbalance caused by tax cuts and rising healthcare and retirement costs.

• It risks hollowing out public services that millions of Americans depend on.

And it won’t balance the budget — not even close.

A Future of Higher Debt and Less Security

If Trump follows the same path in a second term — more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, combined with vague promises of efficiency — the debt will almost certainly continue to climb.

And as debt grows:

• Interest payments will consume a larger share of the budget.

• Pressure to cut Social Security and Medicare will increase.

• Economic growth could slow under the weight of rising borrowing costs.

In other words: the people Trump promises to protect — working-class Americans, retirees, veterans — are the ones who will pay the price.

The Hard Truth: Fiscal Responsibility Requires Real Choices

The U.S. can stabilize its finances — but not with magical thinking.

Real solutions involve:

• Fairer tax policy that ensures corporations and billionaires pay their share.

• Smart investments in healthcare and education to grow the economy long-term.

• Careful reforms to major entitlement programs, balancing sustainability with protection.

Empty slogans about “waste and fraud” won’t save America from a future of rising debt and diminished prosperity.

Only honest leadership and serious policy will.

Up Next

The pattern is clear: false promises, real harm.

Finally, we’ll step back and look at the bigger picture — the choice America faces in the critical years ahead.

Debt Bombs

The Dirty Secret Behind Every Deal

If there’s one thing every great heist needs, it’s a way to destroy the evidence.

Private equity has one:
Debt.

Debt is the smoke bomb they throw as they loot the building.
The fire they set to cover their escape.

And for decades, it’s been their most powerful, least understood weapon.

The Debt Trap

Every private equity buyout starts the same way:
Not with investment.
Not with innovation.
Not with a real plan to grow the business.

It starts with a mountain of debt — debt that is immediately loaded onto the company itself, not the buyer.

It’s called a leveraged buyout (LBO).
But what it really means is this:
The company is forced to mortgage its future just to survive the takeover.

Millions, sometimes billions, in new liabilities — overnight.

The business may have been profitable before.
It may have had cash reserves, a solid workforce, strong relationships with customers.

None of that matters now.

Everything the company earns must go to paying off the debt first — before it can afford to innovate, grow, or even maintain basic operations.

And when the debt load becomes unsustainable?
The company, not the private equity owners, takes the fall.

Why Debt Is So Powerful for Wall Street

Risk is Pushed Down the Chain

The private equity firm collects management fees and special dividends almost immediately.
If the company collapses under its debt later, the firm has already been paid.

Accountability Is Dodged

When a Toys R Us or a hospital collapses, the executives blame “changing markets” or “economic headwinds” — not the crippling debt they were saddled with at gunpoint.

Profits Are Extracted Early

Private equity doesn’t wait for real success.
They extract “value” upfront, cashing in through dividends, asset sales, and rent-seeking while the company is still functioning.

Failure Becomes Someone Else’s Problem

When bankruptcy inevitably comes, it’s the workers, suppliers, and communities who suffer the fallout — pensions lost, stores closed, services eliminated.

Private equity walks away clean.

The Bigger Pattern

By 2023, more than one-third of all U.S. bankruptcies involved companies that had been owned or controlled by private equity firms.

Industries affected include:

• Retail (Toys R Us, Payless Shoes, RadioShack)

• Healthcare (Hahnemann Hospital, Prospect Medical)

• Media (Deadspin, The Denver Post)

• Manufacturing (Remington Arms, Simmons Bedding)

In every case, the pattern is the same:

1. Debt was used to finance the buyout.

2. Profits were extracted early.

3. The company collapsed under the weight.

This isn’t bad luck.
It’s not bad management.
It’s the business model.

Debt is the getaway car.

And every time it crashes into a wall, it’s the workers and communities left bleeding on the pavement.

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Today, in False Promises, we explored The High Price of Pollution — how corporations dump their waste into the environment to protect their profits, leaving the public to pay the price.

Private equity operates the same way.

• They pollute the balance sheet.

• They strip the assets.

• They profit from the destruction.

• And they leave the cleanup — the bankruptcies, the layoffs, the broken communities — to someone else.

It’s not just about money.
It’s about making sure someone else pays for your mess.

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Coming up tomorrow:

The Getaway: Who Profited — and How We Fight Back.

(Because the heist isn’t inevitable — and the thieves aren’t untouchable.)

The High Price of Pollution

How Environmental Deregulation Endangers America’s Future

Donald Trump has made it clear: if returned to power, he will push even harder to dismantle environmental regulations, prioritize fossil fuel expansion, and block the growth of clean energy.

It’s a familiar playbook—and it’s one that has already failed spectacularly.

From the deadly collapse of Texas’s energy grid to worsening climate-driven disasters, the evidence is overwhelming: gutting environmental protections doesn’t make America freer or richer. It makes America weaker, more vulnerable, and more expensive to live in.

The Texas Blackout: Deregulation’s Deadly Costs

In February 2021, a brutal winter storm swept across Texas, plunging temperatures below freezing. The state’s uniquely deregulated energy grid collapsed under the pressure:

• 4.5 million customers lost power.

• Hundreds died from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and lack of access to medical care.

• Economic losses topped $100 billion.

Why did the grid fail?

Not because of wind turbines, as some politicians falsely claimed, but because natural gas infrastructure and power plants froze.

Texas had been warned about these vulnerabilities after a similar storm in 2011—but chose not to require weatherization, trusting market forces to handle it.

Energy companies had no financial incentive to spend money preparing for rare cold snaps. So they didn’t.

The result was a humanitarian and economic catastrophe—the direct consequence of decades of deregulation and short-term profit chasing.

Environmental Rollbacks Leave Americans Unprepared

Under Trump’s first term, the federal government rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, including:

• Cutting requirements for power plant emissions.

• Weakening clean water protections.

• Slashing fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.

These rollbacks didn’t make the economy meaningfully stronger. But they increased air and water pollution and reduced resilience to extreme weather events.

At the same time, climate disasters worsened:

• Wildfires torched record acreage in California and Oregon.

• Hurricanes intensified, causing massive floods from Louisiana to New York.

• Droughts devastated farms across the Midwest.

Ignoring climate risks and weakening protections doesn’t shield Americans from hardship. It amplifies it, leaving communities poorer, sicker, and more dependent on costly disaster aid.

Attacking Renewable Energy Progress

Ironically, even as Trump and other Republican leaders attacked clean energy as “unreliable,” states like Texas quietly became national leaders in wind and solar power.

In 2023, about 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources like wind, solar, and nuclear.

Renewables helped keep the lights on when gas plants failed. They created jobs. They lowered electricity prices.

Yet the Trump movement continues to demonize renewable energy, pushing legislation that would penalize or discourage clean energy projects, while funneling subsidies to fossil fuels.

This isn’t just bad environmental policy. It’s bad economics—and it risks ceding the clean energy race to countries like China and Germany, who are investing aggressively in the industries of the future.

The Dangerous Future Trump Offers

If Trump follows through on his second-term environmental agenda, Americans can expect:

• More grid failures in extreme weather.

• Higher health costs from pollution.

• More taxpayer bailouts for fossil fuel disasters.

• Lost jobs and missed economic opportunities in the global clean energy boom.

Environmental deregulation isn’t a path to prosperity. It’s a path to fragility, suffering, and decline.

A truly strong America invests in resilience, innovation, and public health—not in the short-term profits of the fossil fuel lobby.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The next storm, fire, or flood will not wait for political convenience. The costs are coming—and we can choose to prepare, or to pay dearly.

Up Next

The costs of deregulation are rising — and so is the national debt.

Our next post will reveal how promises to cut “waste and fraud” won’t fix the debt, and could make it even worse.

The Silent Kill

How Wall Street Gutted American Healthcare

It didn’t start with a bang.
It started with a bankruptcy filing, quietly buried in the business section.

A hospital here.
A hospital there.

Another rural clinic shutting down.
Another wave of layoffs in critical care units.

It looked random.
It looked unfortunate.

It wasn’t.

It was part of the same heist — just playing out in a place where the victims aren’t just laid off.
They’re left to die.

The Buyouts

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, private equity firms realized hospitals could be gold mines.

Healthcare was a $4 trillion industry.
It was fragmented.
It was complex.
And it was shielded by layers of government funding.

Perfect conditions for exploitation.

Firms like Cerberus Capital Management, Apollo Global Management, and others swept in, buying up hospitals, nursing homes, emergency room chains, and outpatient clinics.

The pitch was always the same:
“Streamline operations.”
“Cut waste.”
“Deliver better, faster care.”

What actually happened was different.

The Playbook Applied to Healthcare

Step 1: Load the Hospital with Debt

Just like Toys R Us, just like JoAnn Fabrics, hospitals were saddled with massive debt the moment private equity took over.

Profits didn’t go into improving patient care.
They went into paying off loans — and into management fees for the new owners.

Step 2: Cut Staff, Cut Services

Nurses were laid off.
Maintenance crews were slashed.
Support staff were thinned out.
Entire specialty departments — like neonatal units, psychiatric services, and oncology wings — were shut down if they weren’t profitable enough.

Quality of care declined.
Wait times ballooned.
Errors increased.

Step 3: Strip the Assets

If a hospital owned valuable real estate, it was sold — often to landlords who raised rents, draining the hospital further.

If a hospital owned its own ambulance fleet, it was sold and leased back at a premium.

Everything that wasn’t nailed down — and even some things that were — was monetized.

Step 4: Exit Before the Collapse

Once the hospital was hollowed out, the private equity owners either flipped it to another buyer or let it spiral into bankruptcy.

Patients and workers were left holding the bag.
Communities were left without critical care.
Lives were lost.

The Human Cost

In Philadelphia, Hahnemann University Hospital — a 171-year-old institution serving primarily low-income patients — was bought by a private equity-backed developer.

Within a few years, it was shut down.
Hundreds of doctors, nurses, and staff were fired.
Thousands of vulnerable patients lost access to care.

The real goal was never to run a hospital.
It was to flip the valuable real estate it sat on — turning a safety net into luxury condos.

This wasn’t an isolated story.
It has happened in New York.
In California.
In rural towns across the South and Midwest.

Everywhere private equity moves into healthcare, the results are the same:

• Fewer hospitals.

• Higher costs.

• Worse outcomes.

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Today, in False Promises, we explored The Cost of “Small Government” — how deregulation and privatization, sold as efficiency, opened the door to unchecked looting.

Healthcare shows that cost most brutally.

Private equity didn’t just loot toy stores and craft shops.
They came for the hospitals.
They cashed out.
And they left blood on the floor.

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Coming up tomorrow:

Debt Bombs: The Dirty Secret Behind Every Deal.

(Because debt isn’t just a tool in the heist — it’s the fuse they light before they walk away.)

The Cost of “Small Government”

How Deregulation and Privatization Fail American Communities

For decades, “small government” has been a rallying cry of American conservatives. Donald Trump’s second-term agenda promises even deeper cuts to government services, more privatization of public goods, and looser regulations in the name of “freedom” and “efficiency.”

But real-world experiments with these ideas—from Kansas to Texas to the United Kingdom—tell a very different story.

Instead of prosperity, they have delivered crumbling infrastructure, weakened public services, higher costs for consumers, and growing inequality.

Trump’s plans to double down on deregulation and privatization will not make America stronger. They will leave ordinary Americans—especially his own supporters—more vulnerable and less secure.

Kansas: The Tax Cut Catastrophe

In 2012, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched what he called a “real live experiment” in conservative economics: massive income tax cuts, including eliminating taxes on many businesses.

The promised outcome? Explosive job growth and a booming economy.

The reality?

• State revenues collapsed by 22%.

• Public services were slashed. Schools cut programs and shortened their weeks to four days.

• The state’s bond rating was downgraded, increasing borrowing costs.

• Job growth lagged behind neighboring states that kept taxes higher.

After five years of mounting deficits and public outrage, a bipartisan coalition finally reversed most of the tax cuts to save the state from financial ruin.

Kansas showed that radical tax cuts and shrinking government don’t unleash prosperity—they cripple essential services and hurt working families the most.

Texas: Deregulation and Disaster

Texas has long prided itself on a low-regulation, pro-market model. But the February 2021 winter storm exposed the dangerous limits of that ideology.

The state’s heavily deregulated and isolated electricity grid collapsed under freezing temperatures, leaving millions without power for days.

Investigations revealed that Texas had repeatedly ignored calls to weatherize its energy infrastructure, trusting that market forces would provide resilience. They didn’t.

The cost of deregulation:

• Hundreds of lives lost.

• Tens of billions in economic damages.

• Skyrocketing electric bills for some customers who faced variable “market rates.”

Freedom from regulation didn’t deliver better service. It delivered a deadly blackout—and made it painfully clear that basic public infrastructure needs public accountability.

The UK’s Austerity Disaster

Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom embarked on a similar path during the 2010s: cutting public services in the name of fiscal responsibility.

The result was a decade of stagnation:

• Public health outcomes worsened. A study linked over 130,000 “preventable” deaths to austerity.

• Local governments went bankrupt.

• Public transportation deteriorated, and housing shortages worsened.

• Economic growth slowed, leaving Britain worse off than major peers.

Instead of shrinking debt, austerity policies exacerbated social and economic inequality—and arguably left the country more fragile in the face of crises like COVID-19.

The lesson: you cannot cut your way to prosperity, especially by hollowing out the very systems people rely on every day.

What Privatization Really Means

When politicians talk about “shrinking government,” what they often mean is shifting essential services into private, for-profit hands:

• Public schools replaced with voucher-funded private academies.

• Public water systems privatized and then poorly maintained.

• Public health agencies defunded, leaving gaps that for-profit hospitals don’t fill.

Privatization doesn’t eliminate costs. It often increases them, adding layers of profit-seeking middlemen between taxpayers and the services they need.

And crucially: private companies are not accountable to voters. When things go wrong, there’s no election to fix it.

The Dangerous Road Ahead

If Trump’s second term follows the same playbook—tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of critical industries, privatization of public services—the result will be predictable:

• Higher inequality.

• More fragile infrastructure.

• Greater costs for working families.

This isn’t theory. It’s recent history.

True national strength doesn’t come from gutting the public sector. It comes from investing in it—building systems that serve everyone, not just the wealthy few.

Trump’s vision of “freedom” is a freedom for corporations and billionaires. For everyone else, it’s the freedom to fend for yourself.

Up Next

Broken public systems lead to even bigger risks.

Next, we’ll expose how environmental rollbacks and energy failures are leaving Americans dangerously vulnerable.

Collateral Damage

JoAnn Fabrics and the Death of Main Street

It didn’t happen all at once.

There was no sudden bankruptcy.
No headlines screaming the company was dead.

Instead, JoAnn Fabrics — a beloved American retailer, a gathering place for crafters, quilters, teachers, and entrepreneurs — has been slowly hollowed out, store by store, job by job, community by community.

Not by Amazon.
Not by changing tastes.

But by the same quiet financial looters who killed Toys R Us.

The Buyout

In 2011, JoAnn Fabrics was acquired by a private equity firm called Leonard Green & Partners for about $1.6 billion.

The story was familiar:

• JoAnn was profitable.

• JoAnn had strong community ties.

• JoAnn had survived economic downturns, competition, and change.

But after the buyout, everything changed.

Leonard Green loaded JoAnn with debt — hundreds of millions of dollars — and began siphoning off cash through management fees and special dividends.

Rather than investing in modernization, technology, or expanding into new markets, the focus was on extraction.

Stores started to feel neglected.
Staff levels dropped.
Inventory quality declined.

And loyal customers noticed.

The Slow Decline

JoAnn Fabrics didn’t crash overnight like Toys R Us.

Instead, it began to rot from within:

• Store locations became threadbare and poorly maintained.

• Supply chains weakened, leading to frequent stockouts.

• Skilled, full-time employees were replaced by underpaid part-timers.

• Customer service, once a hallmark of the brand, deteriorated.

Even as the company stumbled, private equity owners paid themselves well.
Leonard Green collected fees year after year — no matter how badly the business performed.

Meanwhile, JoAnn’s leadership leaned into gimmicks:

• Cheap loyalty programs.

• Low-wage hiring pushes.

• Desperate promotions to drive foot traffic.

None of it addressed the real disease: a company crushed by debt, bled by fees, and left too weak to adapt.

In 2021, JoAnn was pushed into going public again — not because it was ready, but because Leonard Green wanted an exit.

The burden of debt and decay was dumped back onto public shareholders.
The private equity firm cashed out.

The Impact on Communities

JoAnn Fabrics wasn’t just a retailer.
It was a piece of Main Street life — a place where kids picked up their first school project supplies, where small business owners sourced materials, where elderly hobbyists kept lifelong skills alive.

Its slow collapse mirrors the quiet devastation happening in countless towns across America:

• Empty strip malls.

• Fewer good part-time jobs.

• Communities losing another small anchor that made local life vibrant.

It’s not just about profits.
It’s about belonging.
And when Main Street dies, something inside the town dies with it.

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Today, in False Promises, we explored The Authoritarian Playbook — how broken economies create broken societies, where fear, anger, and hopelessness can be weaponized.

The slow, quiet collapse of places like JoAnn Fabrics is part of that story.

When jobs dry up, when businesses fail, when trust in local institutions withers — people look for someone to blame.

And authoritarians are always ready with an answer:
Blame the immigrants.
Blame the unions.
Blame the poor.

Never blame the billionaires who gutted your town and got rich doing it.

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Coming up tomorrow:

The Silent Kill: How Wall Street Gutted American Healthcare.

(Because the heist didn’t stop with toy stores and craft shops — it moved into hospitals, where the cost of looting is measured in lives.)

What is MS-13, and How Did the U.S. Help Create It?

In our last post, we explored how the language we use—"undocumented" vs. "illegal"—shapes how we treat immigrants. But words are just one piece of the puzzle. To truly understand today’s immigration crisis, we also need to look at the deeper forces that push people to flee their homes in the first place. One of the most common explanations we hear is "gang violence." And one gang in particular gets all the headlines: MS-13.

You may have heard MS-13 described as a foreign threat, a violent force from Central America invading U.S. cities. But the truth is far more complicated—and far more uncomfortable. MS-13 didn’t come from El Salvador. It came from the United States. And U.S. policy played a major role in making it what it is today.

What Is MS-13?

The gang known as MS-13, short for Mara Salvatrucha, began in Los Angeles in the 1980s. "Mara" is Central American slang for gang. "Salvatrucha" likely combines "Salvadoran" with "trucha," a slang term meaning clever or alert. The "13" refers to their allegiance to the Mexican Mafia, also known as "La Eme."

MS-13 was formed by young Salvadoran immigrants, many of them refugees fleeing a brutal civil war back home. In L.A., they faced violence from other established gangs and little protection from law enforcement. Banding together for protection and identity, these youths started what would become MS-13. At the time, it was a small, local street gang—not the international criminal network it would later become.

The U.S. Role in the Salvadoran Civil War

To understand why so many Salvadorans fled to the U.S. in the first place, we have to look at the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992). During this conflict, the U.S. poured billions of dollars into supporting El Salvador's right-wing military government, viewing the conflict as part of the global Cold War fight against communism.

The Reagan administration, in particular, funneled aid and weapons to Salvadoran forces despite widespread reports of human rights abuses. U.S.-trained military units like the Atlacatl Battalion were responsible for massacres, including the infamous 1981 El Mozote massacre, where over 800 civilians were killed. Even after this, U.S. support continued.

These policies prolonged the war, destabilized the country, and left tens of thousands dead and even more displaced. Many of the refugees from this war ended up in Los Angeles, where MS-13 was born.

How Deportation Spread the Gang Internationally

In the 1990s, U.S. immigration policy took a sharp turn. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), signed by President Bill Clinton, expanded the list of crimes that could lead to mandatory deportation. Even legal immigrants with minor convictions were now subject to removal, often with no chance to plead their case before a judge.

Thousands of young people with gang ties were deported to El Salvador, a country still recovering from war and lacking the institutions to reintegrate them. In this chaotic environment, MS-13 evolved. What started as a U.S.-based street gang became a transnational criminal organization with a foothold in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Militarization and the Politics of Fear

After 9/11, the U.S. increasingly treated gang violence as a national security issue. MS-13 became a symbol used to justify tough-on-crime and anti-immigration policies. Successive administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—poured funding into militarized police, detention centers, and border security.

Meanwhile, U.S.-backed anti-gang crackdowns in Central America, like El Salvador's "Mano Dura" (Iron Fist) policies, often backfired. They filled prisons with young people, deepened gang identities, and gave MS-13 the structure and space to become more organized and violent.

A Bipartisan Legacy

The rise of MS-13 is not the fault of one party. It's the product of decades of decisions:

• Reagan and Bush Sr. funded the Salvadoran war effort and ignored atrocities.

• Clinton signed the 1996 deportation law that exported gang violence.

• George W. Bush framed MS-13 as a national security threat.

• Obama continued large-scale deportations while trying to stabilize the region.

• Trump used MS-13 as a political weapon to justify stripping asylum rights.

Each of these steps contributed to the conditions that allowed MS-13 to thrive.

Why It Matters Today

MS-13 is often cited to justify harsh immigration crackdowns. But many of the people arriving at our southern border today are fleeing the very violence that U.S. policy helped create. Instead of treating them as threats, we should be asking what it would take to stop the cycle of violence and displacement.

Toward Solutions: What Real Reform Looks Like

We can’t undo the past, but we can stop repeating it. Here are a few ways forward:

Reform Deportation Laws

• End mandatory deportation for minor, non-violent offenses.

• Restore judicial discretion and case-by-case review.

Expand Legal Migration Pathways

• Create regional asylum processing centers.

• Increase access to Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Invest in Central America—Beyond Police and Prisons

• Prioritize education, healthcare, and economic development.

• Fund anti-corruption efforts and civil society organizations.

End the Criminalization of Migration

• Make unauthorized border crossings civil, not criminal, offenses.

Restore Asylum Protections and Due Process

• Reinstate fair asylum interviews.

• Expand access to legal representation.

Fund Local Violence Prevention

• Support youth outreach, gang exit programs, and trauma care.

Invest in Root-Cause Solutions—They Cost Less and Work Better

• Detaining an immigrant in the U.S. costs about $165 per person per day (source).

• Vocational training in El Salvador can cost as little as $0.25 per hour (source).

• That means for the cost of one day of detention, we could provide 660 hours of job training—a far better investment in long-term safety and stability.

Conclusion: Accountability and Responsibility

MS-13 didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It was shaped by U.S. foreign policy, immigration law, and decades of political choices. We destabilized El Salvador, exported our gang problems, and then used the fallout to justify fear-driven policies.

But we have the power to break that cycle. By investing in people, not prisons, and by treating migration as a human challenge—not a criminal one—we can build a safer, more just future for everyone.

And let’s be honest: compassion isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also cheaper.

The Authoritarian Playbook

How Trump’s Second Term Targets Justice and Civil Rights

In recent months, a chilling pattern has emerged—one that reveals far more than isolated incidents of overreach. Taken together, Donald Trump’s actions show a deliberate move toward authoritarian control, undermining core American institutions like the judiciary and due process.

This isn’t speculation. It’s already happening.

From the shocking arrest of a sitting judge to threats of sending U.S. citizens to a foreign mega-prison, the Trump administration’s moves are sending a clear message: dissent and independence will not be tolerated.

The Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan

On April 25, 2025, FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, accusing her of obstructing immigration enforcement by allegedly assisting an undocumented immigrant in evading ICE at a courthouse.

Legal scholars immediately raised alarms: this was an unprecedented breach of judicial independence. Arresting a judge for decisions made in the course of her duties shatters the traditional separation of powers that has safeguarded American democracy for over two centuries.

The intended effect is clear: intimidate judges, chill independent decision-making, and concentrate more power in the executive branch.

The Deportation to El Salvador’s CECOT Prison

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has taken an even darker turn abroad.

Earlier this year, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a work-authorized immigrant and union apprentice, was wrongfully deported to El Salvador due to a bureaucratic “mistake.” But instead of correcting the error, U.S. officials refused to bring him home—later accusing him of gang affiliations without evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned abroad.

He wasn’t sent just anywhere: he was locked up in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison, a dystopian facility designed for mass incarceration under harsh, authoritarian conditions.

This wasn’t just an accident. It was a test case.

Threats Against U.S. Citizens

Donald Trump has gone even further—publicly suggesting that “violent criminals” born in the United States should be sent to CECOT as well.

Think about that: U.S. citizens, stripped of their constitutional rights, exiled to a foreign authoritarian prison without due process.

This would be an unprecedented assault on American citizenship itself—turning punishment into a tool of political spectacle and fear, outside the bounds of U.S. law.

Even floating such an idea is profoundly dangerous. It normalizes the idea that rights can be selectively revoked, and that loyalty to Trump—not the Constitution—will determine who is protected and who is expendable.

Connecting the Dots: A Dangerous Pattern

These incidents are not isolated:

• Judges are arrested for standing up to federal overreach.

• Immigrants are wrongfully deported and left to rot in authoritarian prisons.

• Citizens are threatened with exile to brutal foreign facilities.

This is the authoritarian playbook in action:

• Discredit and neutralize independent courts.

• Use immigration enforcement as a political weapon.

• Erode the concept of citizenship and due process.

• Instill fear and normalize state-sponsored retaliation.

This is how democracies die—not all at once, but through steady, calculated blows against the institutions meant to protect freedom.

Why It Matters Now

If Trump follows through on these threats and precedents, the damage to American democracy could be permanent. Judicial independence, the right to due process, and even the meaning of citizenship itself are at stake.

These aren’t theoretical risks. They are happening right now. The only question is whether enough Americans will recognize the pattern—and resist—before it’s too late.

Up Next

Undermining the courts is just the beginning.

In our next post, we’ll examine how deregulation and privatization hollow out the public services communities depend on.

The First Big Score

Killing Toys R Us for Profit

It should have been a comeback story.

In 2005, Toys R Us was still a titan:

• A household name.

• Profitable.

• Beloved by generations of American families.

Sure, online shopping was starting to grow, and Walmart and Target were squeezing margins.
But Toys R Us had something they didn’t: a brand synonymous with childhood itself.

There was no fatal flaw in the business model.
No inevitable Amazon-driven doom.

The company was still standing — battered, maybe, but alive.

And that’s when the wolves closed in.

The Buyout

In 2005, a trio of private equity giants — Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust — swooped in with an offer:
Take Toys R Us private.
“Streamline” operations.
“Modernize” the business.
Make it more “nimble” and “competitive.”

It sounded like a lifeline.
Instead, it was the beginning of the end.

The new owners loaded Toys R Us with $5 billion in debt — debt the company never asked for, never needed, and could never escape.

Most of the company’s profits — hundreds of millions of dollars a year — didn’t go toward modernizing stores or competing online.
They went toward servicing the crushing interest payments on the buyout debt.

Toys R Us wasn’t failing.
It was being bled dry.

The Squeeze

By 2007, Toys R Us was spending more than half a billion dollars a year just paying interest on its debts.

Meanwhile:

• Store shelves stayed outdated.

• E-commerce investments lagged.

• Staff cuts eroded customer service.

• Suppliers were pushed to offer harsher terms just to stay stocked.

It was a death spiral — not because customers abandoned Toys R Us, but because private equity stripped away its ability to fight back.

And all the while, Bain, KKR, and Vornado collected millions in “management fees” — profiting off the very company they were dragging toward the grave.

The Collapse

In 2017, Toys R Us finally filed for bankruptcy.

Not because people stopped loving toys.
Not because e-commerce made brick-and-mortar retail impossible.
But because private equity had loaded the company with a financial bomb, and there was no way to defuse it.

When Toys R Us collapsed:

• More than 30,000 workers lost their jobs.

• Thousands of suppliers and small businesses took devastating hits.

• Communities lost vital anchor stores — hastening the decline of shopping centers across the country.

Executives walked away with bonuses.
Private equity firms walked away with profits.

The workers walked away with nothing.

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Today, in False Promises, we explored The Labor Shortage They Created — how short-sighted policies, attacks on workers, and deliberate neglect of the real economy hollowed out America’s workforce.

The collapse of Toys R Us is a perfect, brutal example.

• Good jobs destroyed.

• Communities abandoned.

• A whole generation of workers and consumers betrayed — not by technology, not by globalization, but by greed weaponized through finance.

This wasn’t creative destruction.
It wasn’t inevitable.

It was a hit job.
And Toys R Us was just the first score.

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Coming up tomorrow:

Collateral Damage: JoAnn Fabrics and the Death of Main Street.

(Because sometimes the heist doesn’t make headlines — it just quietly kills your town’s last good store.)