Although capitalism is supposed to be all about hard work and innovation, a good deal of our economic activity is about the chase for easy money. This is quite natural—who wouldn’t want to make a buck without breaking a sweat?—but problems arise when the tax code and outlandish government spending programs incentivize a variety of endeavors that can best be described as either Ponzi schemes, consumer ripoffs, or complete frauds.
The Green Energy “boom” of the last several decades, which has always floated on both ridiculous government spending and inane tax incentives, has peppered our national landscape with wind turbines that are destined to be rusty, collapsing monoliths and solar panels that will be an ecological nightmare when the time comes to discard these hunks of toxic materials. We cannot forget the problems we will also encounter when we are faced with the batteries of millions of derelict electric cars leaching heavy metals into our ground water. The actual job creation touted by the facilitators of this insanity will arrive only on the back end when we will need to waste hundreds of billions more dollars on environmental clean ups and remediation.
The crooked roulette wheel of the clean energy scam is simply emptying our pockets in order to placate climate cuckoos who will spend the rest of their lives waiting for the glaciers to melt and the sky to catch on fire while gulping their Xanax and screaming at the sun—for which the “Green” grifters enriching themselves at our expense are eternally grateful.
Our nation’s residential real estate markets have also been a case study in financial and psychological manipulation that makes Vegas casino operators look like amateurs. Private equity firms and corporate landlord (look them up online yourself; I don’t want to deal with a “cease and desist” order) have been buying up more and more private homes across America in order to squeeze these for rents while using them as collateral for business loans, which they then recycle to buy up even more homes and further skew local housing markets by squeezing the supply of houses for sale while raising prices. This is a market fixing scam that is borderline legal—but entirely wrong—yet it is commonplace in many American cities.
These machinations create a money-making machine that allows the pirates of private equity funds to use their immense wealth to become even wealthier—on the backs of working Americans. However, these magical paper profits will evaporate when, as will inevitably be the case, a price ceiling eventually is reached, the bubble pops, and these corporate buyers have to start quickly selling their portfolios of homes into a sinking market in order to cover the loans they took out to cash in on the housing casino they built to enrich themselves —by fleecing the suckers who just wanted a roof over their heads. Those Main Street Americans who have to purchase homes at artificially inflated prices in metropolitan areas across our nation will inevitably be stuck with underwater mortgages when the tide recedes, but the Wall Street profiteers will have plenty of cash to buy a new Bugatti for their 10-car garages. The fat profits for the few will turn into misery for the many.
The last leg of today’s government-sponsored casino is the mind-boggling—and extortionate—costs of medical care and medicine, which fuels businesses that feed the campaign coffers of corrupt politicians, who do all in their power to make certain hospitals and, in particular, pharmaceutical companies can take full advantage of people when they are at their weakest and most vulnerable. Reading a hospital bill after an illness or injury is a gasp-inducing exercise, and the fear of what insurance companies will decide not to cover haunts those who are often, quite literally, just fighting to survive. Politicians who are anxious not to offend their paymasters have, rather than simply demanding systemic price reductions from providers, spent the last half-century cost-shifting the expense of healthcare into Medicaid and Medicare systems that are now going broke.
It should be no surprise that the healthcare industry pays only cursory attention to preventive care and rarely wants to expend the effort to push back against the junk food and fast food industries that are killing us—one soda pop at a time. After all, unhealthy Americans are money in the bank, so why rock the boat? However, initiatives by the Trump administration to demand more transparent pricing from hospitals during his first term and radically reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals in his second, combined with the efforts of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to improve our food quality, might be the beginning of the end for this last economic casino.
It would be remiss not to recognize that any economic system built on the pursuit of profit can easily veer toward the predatory. Understanding this reality, one can readily understand the attraction of Socialism/Communism for those who despair of ever being able to pay their bills and lead a comfortable life. However, one must know the root of this problem is government policies that surreptitiously encourage profiteering that is actually outright theft while both strangling competition and mandating wasteful spending. Imagine what could be done for average Americans if we had back all the money we have blown for decades on the Green Energy hoax, housing policies and incentives that empty the pockets of working Americans, or even a portion of the taxpayer funding that has flowed into the coffers of healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies via Medicare and Medicaid.
When capitalism is allowed to work at it‘s best, it delivers a fair value for the dollar. However, chicanery and cost shifting today has, thanks to unwarranted government interventions and politicized priorities, turned too much of our economic activity into an exceedingly cruel joke that is betraying our citizens and bankrupting our future. Gambling with taxpayer money—or simply giving it away—is the very definition of crony capitalism, and the moneyed interests that have hijacked our political system to enrich themselves must be held accountable if we are ever to have faith in our nation’s leadership again. Although we still have honest businesses striving to provide the best possible products and services at the best possible price, the shame of our nation is that we allow crooks (and crooked politicians) to rob us on a daily basis with smirking impunity from prosecution because what they are doing is “legal”—even if it is wrong.
When these three legs of today’s casino economy collapse (at least two are already teetering), there will be a hard reckoning that will cause a great deal of economic pain. Jobs will be lost and the reorganizations that follow will fundamentally change the business models of our energy, housing, and healthcare sectors. This process will play out in multiple unexpected ways over the course of many years.
However, accountability will be the key to restoring the faith of our citizens in our basic governmental institutions, and if this does not clearly occur, we will see a lot of pain and no real gains.