For a lot of people, “capitalism” has become a catch-all villain.
Stagnant wages? Capitalism.
Crushing debt? Capitalism.
No upward mobility? Capitalism.
But what if that word is doing more harm than good?
Because what we’re living under today isn’t capitalism in any serious or historical sense.
What capitalism was supposed to be
At its core, capitalism requires a few uncomfortable things:
- Free markets
- Honest price discovery
- Real risk
- Real failure
In true capitalism:
- Bad ideas die
- Overleveraged companies collapse
- Reckless risk is punished, not bailed out
It’s a harsh system—but it’s also self-correcting.
What we actually have
Now compare that to reality.
Markets today are anything but free:
- Monopolies are protected, not challenged (Big Food dominance)
- Corporations help write the regulations meant to restrain them (Regulatory capture)
- Losses are socialized through bailouts (Bank bailouts)
- Money itself is centrally managed and politically distorted (Interest rate manipulation)
This isn’t capitalism.
It’s corporatism, financial feudalism, or state-managed capital—pick your label.
A capitalist system is defined by productivity deciding winners. Our current system is defined by political access deciding winners.
Why blaming capitalism keeps people stuck
When everything is blamed on “capitalism,” something critical gets lost:
clarity—and agency.
Blaming an abstract system feels righteous, but it’s also paralyzing.
You can’t confront what you can’t clearly define.
It’s like blaming gravity for falling after someone shoved you.
Gravity isn’t the problem.
The shove is.
Misnaming the system protects the real mechanisms that quietly ruin lives:
- Debt-based money: Money is created as debt, meaning someone always owes more than exists. This forces perpetual borrowing just to stay afloat.
(Credit cards) - Regulatory capture: Rules meant to protect the public are written or influenced by the industries they regulate. The referee works for one team.
(Big pharma rules) - Artificial credit expansion: Cheap money floods the system, inflating assets like housing and stocks while wages lag behind. Prices rise faster than paychecks.
(Housing bubble) - Risk without consequence: Those closest to power take massive risks knowing they’ll be rescued if things go wrong. Failure is optional—if you’re big enough.
(Bank bailouts)
As long as these remain unnamed, they remain untouched.
The uncomfortable truth
Capitalism didn’t fail you.
A distorted, protected, consequence-free version of it did.
And as long as people fight the wrong enemy,
the right one keeps winning quietly.
If real change is the goal, the first step isn’t overthrowing a word.
It’s identifying the incentives, institutions, and power structures actually shaping outcomes.
Otherwise, we’re just arguing about labels, while the game keeps playing exactly as designed.
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