In America, anybody can make it. That’s what we’re led to believe. That is the story we’re told. We look to the celebrities, the athletes, the entrepreneurs who point to where they grew up and exclaim that it’s possible.

This is bullshit. Manufactured. Pumped into the air like oxygen. It’s the Soma of today’s day and age — a dream recycled from the past to give a sense of the future. You too can be a millionaire. The state sponsors the lottery, and lightning strikes on a hopeful and gives them enough money to make Soddom and Gomorra blush.

Today, it’s even worse. Influencers are millionaires, and seem like everyday people, with “access" to them through various platforms (Instagram, Twitch, OnlyFans). They create tiny cults of a few hundred people, who devote their time and paychecks to them. This proximity makes people feel more important.

And the dream lives on, but it’s not enough. Society is broken. We have ignored the onramps to wealth for far too long. The average person is heavily indebted, with no end in sight. If they’re lucky they can buy a home. If they’re lucky they can save some money in a 401K. If they’re lucky they find someone who will love them. If they’re lucky, they even make enough for a couple of children.

When the checks went out from the government to help people in the pandemic, where did the money end up? Well, it went to credit card debt, to pay for rent, to new cars, to companies for Christmas gifts.

A huge burst of income was accumulated in the hands of the people who owned the assets — who made the cars, owned the buildings, had the banks. The massive amount of money put into the system, in short order, became zeros in a balance sheet for the people who already had the money.

I’ve come to realize that this is what happens with entitlement programs — food stamps become massive subsidies for unhealthy food. Subsidized housing goes to the owners of property. The ones who make out the most are the ones who own the assets. They’re a method that further entrenches the wealthiest. Their stock grows while the money given is enablement, a kind of drug provided to keep them from becoming completely destitute and potentially revolting.

Let me be more clear — the way to become wealthy in America is to have wealthy parents. The wealthy can buy up homes, property, they can own buildings. They can give their children $500,000 to buy a house from a couple that hits hard times, only to then rent that house back to the couple. They don’t do it maliciously. They do it because it’s the right thing to do with money.

This was crystalized in the book Capital in the 21st Century. The rate of return on assets is greater than inflation. Wealth will always accumulate.

But what to do? Government was the salvation, because, for a time, it owned assets. It had buildings that people went to. It had land to build on. It could make money from those assets.

But today, government largely doesn’t own anything. Rather, it pays rents itself. This in turn means that it often has to take out loans to pay for those things, and as the interest grows, the government has no recourse except to increase taxes while the services become worse, or to take out more money, again, while the services become worse.

I feel at a loss. The obviousness of this all, this economic harsh reality, feels oppressive. How did I miss it for so long? The rout is complete. It’s all too clear — we are living in a new gilded age. The only real solution is to tear down many of the institutions of the past.

There needs to be a fire. There needs to be questioning of basic assumptions. The two places that most often interact with people (especially the poor) — the police and teachers— are unionized and often refuse to allow one of their own, despite clear evidence of incompetence, from being punished.

OK, but is it really that bad? You might ask. Well, look at Affirmative Action. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Revenge of the Tipping Point the people who most benefited from Affirmative Action were wealthy, privileged students who had significant access to elite private schools, tutoring and coaching. These quotas in fact maintained a majority white population inside of elite schools, and did very little in really creating or establishing meritocracies at the schools themselves. Rather, the schools found a way to perpetuate standards that kept out a whole host of diverse groups.

The whole thing is nonsensical. The arguments for communism (as Bukowski would say), worse than broken glass, wouldn’t wipe my ass with them. It’s a farce. They’re distractions of the worst kind. They encourage people to vote on philosophy rather than reality. What kind of crap is that? It’s the kind of bullshit that people use to gain power for themselves and then do atrocious things.

It’s pretty simple, it seems. We’re about to enter into a period driven by a new generation, Generation X, characterized by Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, with a strong desire for liberty and a clear desire to tear down what they view as the corruption of the past. It has not yet become calcified. It has not yet become terrible itself. It has years to run its course. It’s ideological in a different way, and it rejects the premise of the past — ideas of the intractability of race, or the thought that social topics are taboo and sacred. They’re gone now. Instead, there’s an extreme belief in technology, in entrepreneurship, in individuality.

What a world. The truth is that we really do need a change. The clearness of these problems are now apparent only because the transition to something new has started.