Buyer be unaware.
Like frogs in boiling water, aside from a few racial protests there has been really no pushback against this system of economic oppression. Chalk it up to rampant con artists constantly brainwashing the sheeple that this is the "best" system ever invented and anything else would be inferior and "socialist". This handy pejorative "socialist" now means anything that would reverse decades of ever-increasing economic exploitation. Historians will puzzle over a populace illiterate enough to believe this grand lie all the way into the deepest depths of depravity. The hardy folks of the 1930s were not nearly as gullible. After 2008 the conservative movement was struggling to garner support for its exceptional failure, so along came the alt-right movement to tie conservatism to economic nationalism using ideological gymnastics. Mainstay conservative policies of mass immigration and free trade were inverted into immigration bans and trade wars. Leave aside the fact that the U.S. sponsored China's entry to the WTO in 2000, and the lucrative reality that the outsourcing mania that ensued was to the primary benefit of U.S. multinational profit. Who cares, that's the past. The ideologically malleable Trump was the alt-right's best shot at America's "Brexit" from Globalization, however the gambit failed. It turns out that the country that invented Globalization has a hard time abandoning it. We can blame the Deep State for sabotaging Trump's efforts, and forget that it was his own economic advisor Larry Kudlow and others of his ilk who were ardently in favor of free trade all along. Historians will have a hard time separating fact from fiction from the useful Idiocracy that now believes the History Channel is for hot rods and aliens.
Useful indeed. Four decades ago companies provided good full time jobs, full healthcare coverage, and employer pensions. Today, most private companies provide no pensions. They found them too expensive to manage so they put the entire burden of retirement on their employees. Which is why most 401ks are under-funded and massively over-allocated to risk. Add in 0% interest rates resulting from decades of mass outsourcing and a record over-valued stock market to complete the retirement mass delusion. If state and local pension plans are falling far behind their funding goals, what chance do non-professional investors have?
On the healthcare front, amid exploding premiums, fewer and fewer companies provide full healthcare coverage, so they have shifted that burden back to employees as well. Unfortunately, due to adverse selection health insurers don't like to provide individual coverage. Which is why Obamacare was needed to fill the ever-widening gap left by employer health care. The same system that Trump did everything possible to destroy in the years ahead of the pandemic.
The higher education system has morphed into nothing more than an exorbitant social stratification system by which the ultra wealthy buy access to the country club for their offspring. For the rest there's four years of binge drinking interrupted sporadically with brief hours of Adderall-assisted rote memorization. Followed by a lifetime of debt serfdom. The good jobs are solely for the well-connected few who attend the best schools.
Which gets us to the surfeit of junk jobs. Underemployment is the major economic crisis of our time, which is why few economists ever discuss it. A new index called the job quality index is finally tracking the inexorable decline in the quality of jobs. Far worse yet, is the fact that today's consumption Borg have now conflated rising wages with "inflation", which they've been taught to believe is always bad. Imagine trying to pull out of a Third World poverty trap when the moronic populace at large believes that higher wages are bad for the economy. Not an easy feat. How do you convince people who are addicted to bullshit to break their intellectual death spiral? It's like telling them to stop eating sugar cereal and guzzling sugar water. Corporations have no use for an educated populace.
All of which is why the pre-Reagan American Dream has been winnowed down to a Third World gambling festival.
We are all gambling now. Some people have no clue, because they've been gambling their entire life and didn't know it. These are the ones who assume the future will be just like the past. For some reason the continual descent into squalor described above didn't capture their attention. So what's their plan 'B' for when all this goes sideways? They don't have one. Leveraging their lifestyle to the maximum at all times is the only thing they know.
The massively overvalued stock market is this society's last vestige of "prosperity". Little do they realize that it has no more value than what the last fools will pay while pretending to be wealthy. It is entirely cleaved from economic reality. The late great Bernie Madoff may as well be fudging the Dow's daily close for all it represents. He was clearly a man only a few years before his time.
All of this points to a society that is sky-diving without a parachute. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is going to close. Just not in the way anyone expects.
So from that standpoint, the "system" worked.
