Matthew Turley

Young men, don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t a good capitalist because you rightfully complain about how hard it is to buy a home, pay your mounting bills, buy your family groceries, or keep a roof over your head. It didn’t always used to be this way, the deck really is stacked against you, and turning you into debt cattle, tax slave, and lifelong renter were the goals of very wealthy and powerful people since they first assigned you a number. Because that’s what you are to them. Your right to complain about it is written in your sweat and blood. And no. You are not experiencing “capitalism.” You are experiencing exploitation they call “capitalism.” You are competing for a starter home against global capital with access to money you could never borrow at rates you could never get. You are paying taxes into a system that subsidizes corporations large enough to purchase the politicians who write the rules governing those corporations. You are watching losses get socialized while profits remain private, industries consolidate until “competition” means choosing which logo gets to fleece you, and financial institutions turn necessities like housing, medicine, education, and even food into investment vehicles to be squeezed for maximum yield. That is not a free market. That is a market with a thumb and an entire federal bureaucracy sitting on the scale. Real Capitalism requires meaningful competition, private property, enforceable contracts, and honest money. When the powerful can purchase exemptions, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory moats, preferential financing, cheap foreign labor, and political influence, while you get a mortgage at seven percent and a lecture about skipping Starbucks, somebody has rigged the %*#* game. You work. You produce. You build. You fix. You haul. You create things people need. and then you watch an ever-growing procession of governments, banks, monopolies, middlemen, institutional investors, and politically connected parasites reach into your pocket to take it. There is nothing anti-capitalist about objecting to that. That is a rigged table where the house writes the rules, deals the cards, owns the casino, lends you the money to play, and then calls you “anti-capitalist” and “unpatriotic” when you notice. Heck, I’ll even complain *with* you. It’ll be fun. But we’ll have to do it while we work because a single day off might cause cascading financial ruin and then they’ll call us lazy.