A Boring Dystopia

Does this website answer this question?

The money system changed so that the bottom 80-90%'s wealth and income is constantly lowered via inflation and that stolen money is then handed over to the richest and most powerful people/companies via debt.

(side note: when I'm saying wages or wealth are shrinking, I mean in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation, since the money you do get paid is worth less each year)

In this new system Nixon set up, new money is created out of nothing via debt via the banks, that money first mostly goes to the largest companies as loans. The Cantillon Effect describes how these companies can use that money before the inflation from the distribution of that money kicks in.

So not only is it stolen money, it's also worth more if you sit right at the tap close to the banks and the central banks.

But the biggest effect is that the working class can't adjust their wage prices as fast as companies can adjust their prices, so they are constantly shrinking compared to corporate profits. only the top income earners can outgrow the devaluation of their income (e.g. tech workers).

As an example, this means Amazon gets the wealth out of your pockets and on top of that profits off of the fact that their workers wages are constantly shrinking in real terms.

Another difference is the one of the working class's most important way to store wealth is through savings which are inflated away constantly, vs the rich have the ability to invest in a way doesn't get inflated away.

Another issue is interest rate manipulation, specifically artificially low interest rates. It floods the market with money, preferentially going to already wealthy people since they have an easier time getting loans and bigger ones. This mainly creates a giant bubble in the real estate market, making everything more expensive than "natural". So anyone with real estate gets richer and richer and everyone else gets screwed over. That's another reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Inflation also constantly devalues debt, so the rich that hold the most debt are effectively getting their debt paid off via the wealth of the working class.

In this system, anyone who can profit from debt and outgrow inflation wins and everyone else looses big time. Practically that means the bottom 80-90% of society.

Then also global labor arbitrage screwed over workers, so outsourcing.

The groundwork for this system was created in 1971. Some of this has been set up later. It was a takeover of our monetary system by crony capitalists to rig it in their favor.

There were a bunch of other policy changes disadvantaging the working class that others argue are more important, but in my opinion the changes to the monerary system are by far the most important effect.

That system has been cloned all over the world, that's why everyone has the same issues.

Another issue is that per capita energy production has been stagnant since 1971, energy correlated almost 1:1 with wealth. But that's at least for a good reason, that being to protect the environment. Still, not only are we not growing richer (besides from efficiency gains), a larger and larger share of what wealth we do have is going to the rich.

If we want to reverse that we need to constitutionally enshrine stable money (i.e. no inflation).

You could also try to redistribute the new money created via inflation to the working class somehow, but that seems silly when you could just have stable money instead. Imagine if you could just build wealth by just saving money again.

Or you could force companies to adjust wages by inflation, but that assumes we can produce accurate inflation numbers. In reality the official inflation numbers are always lower than the real inflation, so workers would still be screwed over. So I'm still for stable money instead.

And unless you want to wait decades to get back the wealth that has been stolen over the last 50 years, you need to redistribute it back to the bottom 80-90% in some way.

For example you could do a 8% wealth tax. The stock market grows by 8-10% each year, meaning if you have money, you just get 8-10% richer each year by literally doing nothing. If you take away that, the playing field is leveled with the working class. it basically means the rich would actually have to work for their money for a change.

We have to change something, because the system is clearly at the breaking point. Economic and well-being indicators haven't been this bad since WW2. And in may cases they are worse.

We are basically just serfs who only exist to make the rich richer at this point.

Nixon i believe.

The end of the gold standard in 1971

I think it's the end of the gold standard

This makes more sense than "rich people doing better than ever" during a down economy.

People tend to scoff and tell me to grow up when I say it, but it's so critical and fundamental... The economy is made up.

All of the "rules" all of the metrics are arbitrary, and usually governments and rich people choose the ones which benefits them most to believe

Food is real. Houses are real. There's enough for everyone. Maybe, just maybe, we can stop running statistics and making bets on mathematical abstractions on top of abstractions on top of an arbitrary system of abstracting value. Trading stock or investing isn't actually work, it doesn't create or change anything, it doesn't actually do anything for humanity. It's basically just gambling. Why is it the most profitable behavior in our system? Why are devoting so much of our resources towards it?

Rich generally do pretty fine for themselves when the "economy" tanks.

Just look at how much richer they got during the COVID recession lol