America Is Socialist For The Wealthiest Citizens.
A look at the real controllers of the American economy.
The American economy is a planned economy, despite the popularly accepted belief that it is a free market. America is a socialist nation, but only for the most important and wealthy citizens, and these citizens are the Financial Controllers of the American Economy.
The Oxford Dictionary defines Socialism as:
“a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
But which community?
Take this definition and apply it to “the community” which is the top 1% of Americans who own the majority of all valuable and tradable resources, and it describes perfectly the American economic model.
In America, if you are rich you will stay that way, and if you are poor you will stay that way too.
Sure, there are a few breakthrough cases here and there of people who go from dirt to dollars, but in reality, it is such a small number of people that it’s almost not worth talking about at all.
And besides, in truth, those stories are rarely true anyway.
On the other hand, if you are truly rich, then you never go backward, you only get richer and richer and richer.
It is an empirical fact.
Here are some numbers
In a free-market economy, there should be a fluid and frequent exchange of wealth, where voluntary exchange without government interference is the sole basis of the system. That is not what is happening in America, not anymore.
First of all, the vast majority of all financial transactions in the USA occur via financial service providers, such as banks or payment processors.
Of all the $19 trillion in deposits in America, almost half is in just four American banks, with the vast majority being littered across the remaining top 20.
This is vastly different from 70 years ago when the majority of transactions in America occurred via cash.
Today, nearly all transactions are simply banks posting transfers to their Balance Sheets between each other.
When you buy something at the grocery store, two banks talk to each other and adjust their statements accordingly, but the money never leaves the inner circle, and most of it stays with the big four banks.
An estimated 81.5% of U.S. households (approximately 107.9 million people) were “fully banked” in 2021, meaning that the household did not use any non-bank transactions and credit.
In other words, all of their economic value and transactions were stored and recorded at banks.
But what does that have to do with socialism?
Again, if socialism is a form of planned economy that focuses on wealth redistribution, then that is exactly what America is. Sure, the popular concept of socialism is wealth redistribution from the top down, but who said it can’t be the other way around?
In the USA, the system redistributes wealth earned from the masses up to the top Financial Controllers.
Yes, the Financial Controllers of America are the people who decide who gets a share, and what a share is.
They decide how much money exists, and ultimately where it lives.
They also decide who is left out.
Saying it is so doesn’t make it so
America claims to be a free market society, kind of like how Disney claims to be the Magic Kingdom.
That doesn’t make it real.
Both political parties in the U.S. pretend to fight for the principles of free markets, but both are lying. Both political parties in the USA are deep in the pockets of the Financial Controllers.
Allow me to explain:
One key feature of free markets is the absence of coerced transactions or conditions on transactions.
This is textbook.
Free markets are also characterized by a spontaneous and decentralized order of arrangements through which individuals make economic decisions.
In America, people don’t make a single non-coerced decision. Every single purchase, every little choice, and every dollar spent is done so under pressure.
But worst of all, most of the time people are spending money that never belonged to them in the first place. This is the consequence of being “fully-banked.”
The American people don’t have money, not really. Americans have bank accounts that give them the right to exchange on behalf of banks and financial institutions.
But the money always goes home.
If the bank doesn’t like what you’re doing, they’ll convince you to do something else. They’ll use teaser rates to get you to take on more debt than you can afford, or provide discount codes for certain products and services. Banks will only finance companies who play the game according to their rules, and let the others die in bankruptcy court before being stripped apart and sold for parts.
Wealth redistribution
Americans got considerably richer as 2021 came to a close, thanks to a nice boost from their stock market holdings and an increase in real estate values.
The news loved to talk about that as if it mattered. In case you wondering who actually got that money, well it was quickly redistributed.
The generally accepted numbers suggest that there is $150 trillion of wealth in America.
Of that wealth, America’s Financial Controllers (aka the top 1%) increased their share by $6.5 trillion last year, which was mainly driven by soaring stock prices and financial markets.
About $4.3 trillion of those gains came from corporate equities and mutual fund shares.
The stock portfolios of the Financial Controllers (1%) are now worth $23 trillion, and they own 54% of all privately held stock shares.
To put this into perspective, the stock portfolios of the wealthiest Americans - that excludes all other assets such as real estate, intellectual property, and private company ownership - exceed the annual GDP of the entire United States of America.
It also exceeds China and Japan combined.
And all of Europe… combined.
“Rising wealth inequality drives the stock market, which then drives more wealth inequality,” - Edward Wolff, professor of economics at NYU
… which drives the stock market, and the circle jerk keeps going.
The total wealth of the Financial Controllers reached a record $45.9 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, with their fortunes increasing by more than $12 trillion during the course of the pandemic.
In other words, while the rest of the world was locked down and trying not to die (or arguing about if the pandemic actually existed) the wealthiest Americans increased their personal wealth by over one-third.
That’s more than a 34% return on investment, during a time when many people were not allowed to work.
It gets worse.
The top 10% of income earners in America owned a record 89% of individually held corporate equities and mutual fund shares at the end of 2021.
But that’s not the entire stock market.
No, 80% of the stock market is controlled by institutional investors, such as banks.
So in actuality, of the remaining 20% available to individuals, 9 out of 10 shares remaining in the market are owned by the individually wealthy.
And yet Americans call them “publically traded companies.”
It gets even worse.
Republicans love to call private businesses the most important aspect of the American economy.
Job creators.
Entrepreneurs who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and attain the American dream.
Well… sorry to burst your bubble, but the Financial Controllers own that too.
The top 1% own 57% of all private companies, and that is according to the Federal Reserve in Washington D.C.
The value of private businesses held by these controllers increased by 36%, or $2.2 trillion, last year alone.
That’s better than the stock market.
Meanwhile, PwC claims that data shows a 39% increase in business failures in 2022 compared to 14.4.
So what’s the secret? Well, it’s certainly not positive thinking.
The secret to private business growth for the wealthy is Private Equity and Hedge Funds. Groups of wealthy people who all agree with each other and go to the same country clubs get together and pool their resources to buy already expensive assets and do a “value analysis” to make it more appealing to other people who think just like them.
This is where the Democrats get involved. They love to pass legislation favoring investments in their friend’s endeavors while stifling those in areas that don’t fit their agenda.
But of all these ways of getting wealthier, nothing is more lucrative than real estate.
Increasing real estate values help the rich the most. Either their wholly owned assets increase in value and/or the rents they can charge increase.
Insurance companies love it also because then the premiums on those properties increase since they are worth more. Their annuities go up.
The 1% in America enjoyed an increase in real estate assets by just under $1 trillion during the pandemic, to reach an all-time high of $5.27 trillion. The number continues to climb.
Meanwhile, the bottom 90% of Americans added a paltry $2.89 trillion to their wealth last year from real estate. That’s spread out across roughly 310 million people.
Simply put, for the Financial Controllers of America, property values went up by over $700k per person, while the average American saw their property values increase by $9k per person.
Assigned socialism
You can buy anything in America, and the wealthy Financial Controllers of America have purchased a status where they transcend private ownership. They have become governors of the system. Once you are at their level, you are an enforcer, a regulator, a controller.
The true regulators and controllers of America believe in Socialism - for themselves.
They believe in wealth redistribution if they are on the receiving end, and they believe in a planned economy if they are doing the planning.
That’s it. That is America.
Financial service providers that manage everyone else’s money continue to consolidate into fewer and larger companies with more power to enforce and coerce.
They provide all the controls, interactions, exchanges, accounts, and all the records.
They have literally become houses for money.
Eventually, the money goes home.
Why isn’t this understood better by Americans?
One thing that socialist societies are very good at is propaganda. America is no different. The American Financial Controller PR machine does an excellent job of convincing people that the American Dream is a real thing.
It’s not.
In America, when rich people are in danger of losing their wealth, the government intervenes and uses tax dollars from the masses to preserve the status of the wealthy.
Rich Americans call this free market capitalism.
Kind of like how Orwell’s dystopian society called the place where you are tortured and murdered the Ministry of Love.
Fat socialist cats smoking cigars
Some might argue that the U.S. economic system subscribes to a free-market system since it leaves the means of production in the hands of private ownership, however, that’s just utter rubbish.
Socialism is an economic concept that believes in a socialist economy where the means of production are collectively owned or controlled — in the case of America, the collective ownership is amongst a minority of elite shareholders.
The American government assigns and protects that ownership, and they do it because they work for the 1%, the Financial Controllers.
America is not a free market economy
Free market systems do not have different sets of rules for different populations based on their economic power.
Free market systems do not consider any one person or organization “too big to fail.”
A truly free market system does not subscribe to an institutional system of corporate welfare that prevents the market from self-regulating.
Capitalism depends upon private ownership, but the American Government and legal system decide how ownership is assigned and protected, and this is particularly so when it comes to money, and the creation thereof.
A common term for this is Cronyism, a system where free enterprise goes out the window, and businesses instead profit off of their returns from colluding with politicians. When cronyism becomes institutional and is administered by just a few power brokers, the correct term is Oligarchy.
In America, the Oligarchs have created a socialist paradise for themselves.
Utter Rubbish is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for reading.
"In America, people don’t make a single non-coerced decision. Every single purchase, every little choice, and every dollar spent is done so under pressure." Preach!!
The USA ceased to be a free market economy just before the turn of the 20th century. A great many companies formed and managed by the "robber barons" are still in existence today, in the 21st century.