A devout capitalist on Facebook claimed Trump’s economic performance was superior to Biden’s (except for COVID), and flatly declared “consumers have choices.”

I replied: “It’s very glib to say ‘consumers have choices.’ Many choices have been systematically reduced by capital concentrations now starving the lower classes. Increasingly dominated by monopolistic and military interests, U.S. capital allocation deprives more citizens of choice by denying them adequate education or the choices one can make with a degree or adequate health care or wages sufficient for savings enough to buy a home or change jobs.”

I didn’t expect this person to sympathize with my argument. He and so many others have been raised amid prevailing “free market” beliefs, and may have benefited from them, just as whites in apartheid South Africa were raised to believe their lots in life reflected some manifest destiny or innate superiority, or as some French came to favor dirigisme at all cost, or those living behind the former Iron Curtain were inculcated (significantly through propaganda) to think that communism was “the way.”

Too many here have been steeped in post-1980s liberal market capitalism and drunk the trickle-down, invisible-hand Kool-Aid to be able to challenge its negative operating behaviors, now so manifest as to be wept over (see statistics on wealth, poverty, reading levels, domestic violence, household savings, etc.).

I may not live to see the destruction it brings on itself but the current levels of wealth concentration are signs to me it will come.

Eric Best
Frenchboro