The Full Progressive Agenda

You’re standing in line at the pharmacy, clutching a prescription that your doctor says you absolutely need. The pharmacist types something into their computer, grimaces, and tells you your insurance won’t cover it. The cost? $347 for a month’s supply. You walk away empty-handed because rent is due next week. Meanwhile, the CEO of your insurance company just announced record profits and bought his third home.

Or maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who has “good insurance” through your job. You hate the work, your boss is toxic, but you smile through gritted teeth because your kid has asthma, and changing jobs means risking a gap in coverage. Freedom in America means the freedom to choose which corporation holds your health hostage.

These aren’t unfortunate accidents in an otherwise working system. They’re features, not bugs. They’re how the system is designed to work—extracting maximum profit from human necessity.

Universal Healthcare

Maria worked as a hotel housekeeper for fifteen years. When she started feeling sharp pains in her abdomen, she ignored them. No insurance, no sick days, and three kids to feed meant doctor visits weren’t in the budget. By the time she collapsed at work and was rushed to the ER, her cancer had spread. Now she’s gone, leaving behind medical bills that her family will never pay off.

The American healthcare system isn’t failing—it’s succeeding spectacularly at what it was designed to do: extract maximum wealth from human suffering. We’ve created a masterpiece of inefficiency where insurance companies employ entire departments dedicated to finding reasons not to pay for your care, hospitals charge $75 for an aspirin with a straight face, and pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than research.

This “complexity” isn’t some natural phenomenon like weather patterns. It was engineered—deliberately, methodically, expensively—by an industry that profits from confusion. Every incomprehensible bill, every “out-of-network” surprise, every prior authorization requirement exists not because healthcare is inherently complicated, but because complexity creates extraction opportunities.

Meanwhile, Canada somehow manages to provide universal coverage at half our cost. The UK’s National Health Service delivers better outcomes across most metrics despite spending a fraction of what we do per capita. Even “free-market” Switzerland requires standardized, non-profit basic insurance for everyone. But we’re supposed to believe universal healthcare is as fantastical as unicorns and dragons.

Medicare for All isn’t just about compassion—though there’s certainly that. It’s about liberation. How many of us remain trapped in jobs we hate because we can’t risk losing insurance? How many entrepreneurs never start businesses because they can’t afford to sacrifice employer coverage? How many workers accept abuse because a health crisis without insurance means financial ruin?

The “how will we pay for it” crowd mysteriously disappears when it’s time for another aircraft carrier or tax cut for the wealthy. But suggest that Americans deserve the same healthcare security enjoyed by citizens of every other advanced democracy, and suddenly the nation that put people on the moon can’t figure out how to implement a system that works everywhere else.

Enhanced Social Security

After 45 years working as a plumber, Robert’s body gave out before his mortgage did. His Social Security check—$1,842 a month—barely covers his medications and utilities, let alone food and housing. Meanwhile, his former boss, who earned five times what Robert did, receives the same maximum benefit because earnings above $160,200 aren’t subject to Social Security taxes. This isn’t coincidence—it’s policy.

The myth that Social Security is “going broke” has been used to terrify the elderly and justify benefit cuts for decades. Meanwhile, a simple solution has always existed: remove the cap on taxable income. If millionaires paid the same 6.2% on all their income that you pay on yours, the system would be solvent indefinitely, with room for expanded benefits.

The investment industry has spent billions promoting the fiction that Social Security is unsustainable, because they want your retirement savings in their fee-generating accounts, not in a secure public system. Every frightening headline about Social Security’s impending doom helps funnel more money into 401(k)s, IRAs, and other private retirement vehicles where Wall Street can extract its cut.

True retirement security would mean expanding benefits to provide actual dignified aging—not just bare subsistence. It would mean creating dependent senior care support integrated into the system, recognizing that aging parents shouldn’t have to choose between quality care and impoverishing themselves. It would mean acknowledging that a society wealthy enough to create multiple trillion-dollar tech companies can certainly afford to ensure its elderly don’t eat cat food to survive.

When they say we can’t afford better Social Security benefits, what they mean is they don’t want to pay for them. The money exists—it’s just currently sitting in offshore accounts and luxury real estate instead of supporting dignified retirements for the workers who built this country. And as we discussed in the chapter on Modern Monetary Theory, even if the money didn’t exist, it can be made to exist with the use of the printing press—the same mechanism the right uses to fund its massive tax cuts.

Family and Community Support Systems

Jenny wakes at 5 AM to dress her children before dropping them at her mother’s house on her way to her first job. Her mom is 70 and shouldn’t be chasing toddlers, but quality childcare would cost $2,300 a month—more than Jenny’s rent. When her son gets sick, she faces an impossible choice: stay home and lose a day’s wages (and maybe her job), or send him to school sick. Meanwhile, politicians give speeches about “family values” while voting against paid family leave for the 23rd time.

It’s a special kind of American exceptionalism to call ourselves “pro-family” while being the only developed nation without paid family leave. Our national mythology venerates motherhood while creating a system where giving birth can mean financial ruin. We lecture about “family values” while forcing parents to choose between staying home with a sick child or keeping their job. And consider a family life on one income? You must be joking.

Universal childcare isn’t some radical socialist plot—it’s economic common sense. When quality, affordable childcare is available, more parents can work, businesses have access to more talent, and children receive early education that pays dividends for decades. The return on investment for early childhood education is among the highest of any public spending. But mention public support for families, and suddenly we’re concerned about “handouts.”

The expanded Child Tax Credit briefly lifted millions of children out of poverty before it was allowed to expire—because apparently child poverty is less troubling than the prospect of poor families receiving government assistance. In just six months, it reduced child poverty by 30%, improved nutrition, decreased financial stress, and increased parents’ ability to work. Its expiration was a policy choice that immediately threw those same children back into poverty. It funded tax cuts though—food taken from the mouths of poor children to pad elite portfolios.

Paid family and medical leave exists in every other developed country because it works. It reduces employee turnover, increases productivity, improves health outcomes, and strengthens family bonds. The apocalyptic warnings from business lobbies about how it would destroy companies have been tested in dozens of countries and states—and proven consistently false.

The economic sleight-of-hand that renders care work “unproductive” is perhaps the greatest accounting fraud in history. The labor that maintains human life and raises the next generation is treated as economically invisible—until it stops. Only when schools close or childcare disappears do we suddenly realize this “unproductive” work is actually the foundation that makes all other economic activity possible.

Housing Guarantees

Marcus works two full-time jobs but still spends 58% of his income on a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood with rising crime and failing schools. Each year, his rent increases while maintenance requests go ignored. His landlord lives in another state and owns 12,000 units across the country. When Marcus asked about the latest rent hike, the property manager shrugged and said, “Market rates.” Meanwhile, three luxury condo buildings in his city sit half-empty, owned mostly by investors who visit twice a year.

The housing crisis isn’t a natural disaster—it’s a policy choice. We’ve decided, collectively and deliberately, that homes should be primarily investment vehicles funding retirement rather than places to live. The result is a system where Wall Street firms own suburban neighborhoods, foreign investors park money in empty luxury apartments, and working Americans spend over half their income on housing.

When combined with student loan debt, stagnating incomes, and a lack of high-paying jobs, the result is delayed household formation, adult children living at their parents’ home until their 30s, and the average age of first-time homebuyers is over 35 and all homebuyers is over 55. So much for the family home, and such late life purchases make building equity for retirement nearly impossible.

Public housing in America has been deliberately starved, stigmatized, and sabotaged. Compare Singapore, where over 80% of residents live in high-quality public housing that builds equity, to American public housing projects designed to concentrate poverty and minimize government responsibility. The difference isn’t capability—it’s political will.

Rent control has been demonized by the same investment firms buying up housing stock to create artificial scarcity. The “supply and demand” explanations for housing costs conveniently ignore how foreign capital, speculation, short-term rentals, and corporate purchasing distort local markets. When housing financialization delivers double-digit returns to investors, the “invisible hand” becomes remarkably visible in local zoning boards.

Community land trusts, cooperative housing, and alternative ownership models offer proven alternatives to the binary choice between unchecked market exploitation and failed public housing projects. These models provide security, build community wealth, and preserve affordability—which is precisely why they’re marginalized in policy discussions dominated by development interests.

The deliberate confusion between “home prices” and “housing costs” serves those profiting from the current system. Rising home prices are celebrated as economic good news, even as they make shelter increasingly unaffordable for larger segments of the population. We’ve created a system where housing is too expensive to buy and too expensive to rent, with homelessness as the predictable result.

Environmental and Infrastructure Investment

The water in Sheila’s town has been undrinkable for three years. The pipes are lead, the treatment plant is failing, and the local government can’t afford repairs because the factory that once provided tax revenue closed and moved operations to Mexico. Meanwhile, bottled water companies extract millions of gallons from nearby springs for pennies, bottle it in plastic made from fossil fuels, and sell it back to Sheila for $1.79 per liter. The invisible hand of the market giving everyone the middle finger.

The fossil fuel industry pulled off history’s greatest accounting trick: keeping the profits while making us pay the costs. They’ve extracted trillions in wealth while passing the cleanup bill to taxpayers, the healthcare costs to patients, and the climate catastrophe to future generations. Their stroke of genius was convincing us that addressing their mess is somehow an economic burden rather than the investment opportunity of the century. When your house is flooding because someone left the tap running, turning off the water isn’t a “job-killing regulation”—it’s basic self-preservation.

The Green New Deal isn’t some hippie hallucination—it’s an economic security program disguised as environmental policy. Its core proposals are embarrassingly straightforward:

• a national clean electricity standard requiring 100% carbon-free power by 2035;
• massive public investment in renewable infrastructure, creating millions of union jobs;
• modernized electrical grids and energy storage;
• retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency; and
• expanded public transportation.

While these initiatives would dramatically reduce emissions, they’re actually economic policies aimed at reclaiming public control over essential systems from corporations that have weaponized them against us.

What conservatives conveniently omit from their cost calculations is how these investments would free us from the economic hostage situation of volatile oil prices, foreign supply shocks, and the endless extraction of wealth from regular people. The real radical position isn’t investing in clean energy—it’s continuing to pour money into the nineteenth-century technologies slowly cooking our planet while sending our wealth to petrostates and oil executives.

Unlike the tepid “market-based solutions” that accomplish nothing but preserving corporate control, progressive policies recognize that public investment and public ownership are essential. We need federal funding for locally-controlled clean energy projects, a public infrastructure bank to finance community-owned utilities, and direct public employment programs for climate mitigation work that private companies won’t touch because it doesn’t generate quarterly profits. The “private sector leadership” crowd has had fifty years to address climate change and has instead spent billions denying it exists—their leadership privileges are revoked.

America’s infrastructure resembles a wealthy family that stopped maintaining their mansion to save money, then acts shocked when the roof caves in and repairs cost ten times what maintenance would have. We’ve normalized this cycle of deliberate neglect, catastrophic failure, and emergency spending that somehow always costs more while delivering less. Texas’s “market-efficient” power grid left people freezing in the dark while energy traders made billions—a perfect metaphor for the entire extractive approach to public necessities.

Public transportation suffers from manufactured decline: starve it of funding, watch service deterioration, use that as evidence it “doesn’t work,” cut more funding. Meanwhile, we socialize the costs of private transportation through hundreds of billions in highway subsidies, tax breaks for parking, and military operations securing oil supplies. Progressive policy demands a complete reversal: universal access to high-quality public transit through federal investment in local systems; high-speed rail connecting our cities; transit-oriented development that creates walkable, affordable communities; and an end to the automobile subsidy machine that has shaped our built environment for extractive purposes rather than human ones.

The genius of the fossil economy isn’t just extracting oil from the ground—it’s extracting wealth from communities by making them pay for the resulting cancer clusters, asthma epidemics, and climate disasters. It’s no coincidence that the most polluted zip codes correlate perfectly with lower income and higher percentages of minorities. The same boardrooms that decide to cut wages also decide which communities get to breathe clean air. Environmental justice isn’t an afterthought to climate policy—it’s the core principle that guides where investments go first, ensuring that historically overburdened communities receive priority for clean energy projects, pollution remediation, and climate adaptation measures.

The “jobs versus environment” framing belongs in a museum of corporate propaganda alongside “smoking is healthy” and “lead paint is safe.” Clean energy already creates more jobs per dollar than fossil fuels. Weatherizing buildings, installing solar panels, upgrading electrical systems—these labor-intensive jobs can’t be outsourced to China or automated by AI. Progressive policy guarantees that these jobs will be union jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, with training programs and hiring preferences for displaced fossil fuel workers and marginalized communities. The real choice isn’t between jobs and the environment; it’s between an economy that extracts wealth from workers and the planet versus one that generates prosperity by investing in both.

What separates progressive climate policy from centrist approaches isn’t the recognition that climate change is happening—it’s the willingness to confront the structures of economic power that created the crisis in the first place. We don’t just need carbon reduction; we need democratic control over energy systems, public ownership of essential infrastructure, and an end to the corporate capture of regulatory agencies. This isn’t climate policy as typically conceived—it’s a fundamental restructuring of economic power relations, which is precisely why those currently benefiting from extraction fight it with such desperation.

Democratic Economic Institutions

When Lakeville’s public water system needed upgrades, a private company offered to take it over, promising efficiency and investment. Five years later, rates had doubled, service complaints had tripled, and the company had extracted millions in profits while postponing most of the promised improvements. The town council that approved the privatization deal included three members who now work for the water company. This isn’t corruption—it’s business as usual.

The “there is no alternative” narrative is perhaps the most successful propaganda campaign in modern history. We’re told that publicly owned utilities, banks, internet service providers, or transportation systems are somehow contrary to American values—conveniently ignoring that hundreds of American cities successfully run municipal utilities, that North Dakota operates a public bank, that Chattanooga provides public broadband, and that most of our transportation infrastructure was built and is maintained by the public sector.

Public banking offers a proven alternative to the extraction model of Wall Street. The Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully for over a century, helping the state weather financial crises while supporting small businesses, funding student loans at reasonable rates, and partnering with community banks. But mention public banking elsewhere, and you’d think someone had suggested Soviet-style central planning.

Worker ownership isn’t some utopian concept—it’s a proven business model operating successfully across the country and around the world. Companies like New Belgium Brewing and Bob’s Red Mill operate as employee-owned enterprises. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain employs over 80,000 people in a cooperative structure. These models deliver better job security, more equitable compensation, and often greater productivity and innovation than their extractive counterparts.

Corporate charter reform recognizes a basic truth: corporations exist by public permission. They are legal constructs granted special privileges by society, including limited liability for their owners. The idea that these artificial entities should be required to consider impacts beyond short-term shareholder returns isn’t radical—it’s a return to the original purpose of incorporation as a public benefit mechanism.

Labor law in America has been systematically dismantled to the point where union busting is treated as a standard business expense. The National Labor Relations Board is so underfunded and penalties for violations so minimal that companies routinely break the law as a cost-benefit calculation. Restoring labor rights doesn’t require revolution—it requires enforcing the laws already on the books and updating them for the modern economy.

Private Equity Reform: Defanging the Attack Dogs

Private equity firms have perfected wealth extraction to an art form, leaving economic devastation in their wake while enriching a small financial elite. Their leveraged buyout model—forcing companies to take on debt to fund their own acquisition—would make medieval loan sharks blush with envy. But rather than dwelling on problems we’ve already covered, let’s focus on solutions that could actually rein in these financial predators.

First, let’s eliminate the carried interest loophole—that magical tax provision allowing billionaire fund managers to pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. This 16th-century tax dodge lets them classify what is obviously compensation as investment income, effectively cutting their tax bill in half for the challenging work of destroying functioning businesses. Closing this loophole isn’t radical—it’s basic tax fairness that even some Wall Street veterans support.

Second, we need meaningful restrictions on leveraged buyouts. Companies should not be allowed to take on debt exceeding a certain percentage of their assets or earnings specifically to finance their own acquisition. This isn’t anti-capitalist—it’s protecting functional markets from financial strip-mining. When Toys “R” Us collapsed under $5 billion in acquisition debt, destroying 33,000 jobs, that wasn’t creative destruction—it was calculated extraction.

Third, essential services require special protections. When private equity takes over nursing homes, hospitals, housing, or local newspapers, they should face mandatory quality standards, minimum staffing requirements, and restrictions on asset stripping. Studies show higher mortality rates in private equity-owned nursing homes—the literal definition of profit over people. These aren’t just businesses; they’re societal infrastructure.

Fourth, transparency requirements would shed light on the deliberately opaque world of private equity. Mandatory disclosure of fee structures, actual returns, and extractions would make it harder to hide the financial shell games that enable excessive profit-taking while businesses crumble. Sunshine remains the best disinfectant for financial chicanery.

Fifth, workers need protection when their employers are acquired. Employees should have right of first refusal to purchase companies through employee stock ownership plans before private equity vultures can swoop in. They should also receive severance guarantees that can’t be wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings after private equity has extracted its profits.

Finally, we need to rethink tax incentives around debt. Eliminating interest as a tax deduction would discourage the excessive leverage that makes the private equity model possible. Tax deductions are government subsidies, and we’re currently subsidizing the destruction of functional businesses. Companies can still expand through equity offerings and retained earnings—methods that don’t create the extractive dynamics of debt.

These reforms aren’t about punishing success—they’re about distinguishing between value creation and value extraction. Private equity’s current model doesn’t represent capitalism; it represents organized extraction under the veneer of investment. By implementing these targeted reforms, we can ensure that financial innovation serves the economy rather than cannibalizing it.

Antitrust Resurrection

When Sarah’s local newspaper closed, she didn’t think much of it—she got her news online anyway. Then the county commission quietly approved a tax break for a chemical plant that later contaminated the local river. No reporters were there to cover it. The plant’s parent company owns the only TV station in town, which ran stories about the jobs created but nothing about the tax breaks or the pollution. The parent company’s CEO plays golf with the governor. How convenient.

The ghost of Louis Brandeis must be screaming into the void as we’ve allowed monopoly power to reconcentrate to Gilded Age levels. Here’s a fun fact that never makes it into economics textbooks: Congress passed laws that explicitly and unambiguously outlaw ALL monopolies. Not some monopolies. Not bad monopolies. ALL monopolies. The Sherman Antitrust Act doesn’t include a footnote saying “unless they promise to be really nice about it.” There is no such thing as a good monopoly under American law.

But then came Robert Bork with his “consumer welfare standard”—a perversion of law so brazen it would make a carnival barker blush. Suddenly, monopolies weren’t monopolies unless economists (conveniently funded by corporations) could prove they raised consumer prices through complex mathematical models. How terribly fortunate for the billionaire class that this intellectual slight-of-hand appeared just as they were consolidating their power.

Through a purposeful effort begun under the Reagan administration—and accelerated by packing courts with judges who never met a corporate merger they didn’t like—antitrust regulation fell dormant for over 40 years. When Lina Khan tried to dust off these perfectly valid laws under Biden, you’d have thought she’d suggested nationalizing Amazon based on the corporate hysteria that followed. Under Trump’s second term, even these modest efforts have been abandoned faster than campaign promises about helping the working class.

The “consumer welfare” standard that replaced actual antitrust enforcement is a spectacular failure on its own terms—consumers pay higher prices, receive worse service, and have fewer choices across industries from airlines to internet service to eyeglasses. When four companies control 80% of meat processing, farmers take whatever price they’re offered. When hospital mergers eliminate competition, not only do prices rise, but quality falls and workers lose leverage. When tech platforms become unavoidable intermediaries, they set the rules for millions of businesses and billions of users.

Monopolies are the ultimate tool of the rentier class because they transform what should be temporary capitalist profits—the kind that naturally evaporate through competition over time—into permanent extraction engines that continue siphoning money in perpetuity. In competitive markets, profits signal other firms to enter, increasing supply and driving prices back toward costs. But monopolies slam that door shut, allowing the extraction to continue indefinitely. It’s not capitalism; it’s feudalism with better marketing.

The arguments against monopolies made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries remain as sound today as when they were first articulated. Monopolies don’t just raise prices—they corrupt democracy itself by concentrating power in too few hands. They kill innovation by allowing dominant firms to buy or crush potential competitors. They suppress wages by reducing labor market competition. And they undermine communities by centralizing economic decision-making in distant corporate headquarters.

Breaking up concentrated economic power isn’t some radical proposition—it’s returning to the bipartisan consensus that prevailed for most of the 20th century. President Teddy Roosevelt, hardly a communist, made his name as a trust-buster. The choice isn’t between capitalism and socialism—it’s between a system where economic power is dispersed and one where it’s concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Between actual capitalism and a rentier-driven aristocracy wearing capitalism’s clothes.

Restoring actual antitrust enforcement doesn’t require new laws—it requires enforcing the ones we already have. The laws that served us well for 60-80 years before the corporate capture of government convinced us that monopolies were actually good, actually. All we need is the political will to recognize what our great-grandparents understood perfectly well: economic power, like political power, must be dispersed to prevent tyranny.

Financial Sector Containment

Every three months, Wall Street holds its breath for the ritual of quarterly earnings calls. Miss projections by a few pennies per share, and your company’s stock plunges. Announce layoffs—even when profitable—and watch your stock soar. Meanwhile, a teacher in Kansas who invested her retirement savings in that company’s stock through her 403(b) has no idea that high-frequency trading algorithms are buying and selling her future security thousands of times per second, extracting microscopic amounts with each transaction until they add up to billions.

The financial sector has transformed from a service industry that facilitated productive investment into an extraction industry that dominates the economy. Banking, insurance, and investment used to account for about 10% of corporate profits in the 1950s. Today, they claim around 30%—not because they’re creating more value, but because they’ve positioned themselves to extract more from every economic transaction.

Paper Isn’t Production

Let’s get something straight: reshuffling ownership papers doesn’t create actual value. The financial elites have somehow convinced themselves—and tragically, much of the public—that their elaborate shell games of derivatives, securitizations, and algorithmic trading constitute “productive” activity. But nobody drives a credit default swap to work. No family gathers around a leveraged buyout agreement for warmth. No child is nourished by a high-frequency trade.

These paper constructs serve no purpose in actual human lives except to obscure the movement of money from the many to the few. The financial industry’s greatest con is equating complexity with value creation. They’ve built an entire parallel economy of increasingly abstract financial instruments that exist solely to extract wealth from the real economy where actual goods and services are produced. The fact that we even need to point out that paper isn’t production shows how deeply the delusion has penetrated.

Owning Isn’t Earning

Perhaps the most perverse achievement of the rentier class is convincing working people that passive ownership constitutes “earning.” The hedge fund manager who makes $1 billion by simply owning the right pieces of paper is celebrated as a “wealth creator,” while the nurse working 60-hour weeks is told her labor isn’t valuable enough to warrant healthcare benefits.

These economic parasites have perfected the art of extraction without contribution. They genuinely believe that their act of ownership—something requiring no effort, producing nothing of tangible value, and often inherited rather than achieved—justifies siphoning billions from the actual productive economy. The sheer audacity would be impressive if it weren’t so destructive. Sitting on assets isn’t work. Collecting dividends isn’t labor. Yet we’ve constructed an entire economic religion around worshipping these modern feudal lords who “earn” in a day what their employees won’t see in multiple lifetimes.

Reclaiming the Financial System

Financial transaction taxes offer the rare policy that simultaneously reduces harmful speculative trading, raises substantial revenue, and protects productive investment. A tax so small that average investors would barely notice it would raise billions from high-frequency traders whose entire business model relies on microsecond advantages. Yet the idea remains “controversial” because the financial industry’s congressional influence matches its economic power.

Public banking options would provide basic financial services without predatory fees, interest rates, or discriminatory practices. The Postal Service successfully provided basic banking services for decades and could do so again, ensuring that everyone has access to banking regardless of income or location. Meanwhile, the same banks that charge $35 overdraft fees receive near-zero-interest loans from the Federal Reserve whenever they need liquidity. Funny how that works.

Executive compensation has reached levels that would make the pharaohs blush, particularly in the financial sector. CEOs now make 400 times the median worker’s salary, up from about 20 times in the 1950s. This isn’t because today’s executives are 20 times more talented than their predecessors—it’s because they’ve rigged the system through stock buybacks, compensation committees filled with fellow executives, and the ideology that shareholder value is the only metric that matters.

Making financial fraud unprofitable means ending the practice of fines without admission of wrongdoing. When banks can defraud consumers of billions and pay millions in fines, it’s not punishment—it’s a business expense. When executives who authorized illegal practices never face personal consequences, the message is clear: crime pays, as long as you’re wealthy enough. Treating financial crimes like the serious violations they are—with actual prison time for those responsible—would change the risk calculation overnight.

The financial sector should exist to serve the productive economy, not the other way around. Containing its excesses isn’t anti-capitalist—it’s pro-functional markets that actually serve human needs rather than extracting from them.

Democratic Corporate Governance

Miguel works at a factory that’s been in his town for three generations. Last week, a private equity firm announced they’re buying the company. This week, rumors are flying about “restructuring.” No one asked the workers, the town, or anyone else who’ll be affected. The boardroom decision will impact thousands of lives, but those people have no voice. They’re just “externalities” in a spreadsheet somewhere. How terribly convenient for everyone except, you know, actual human beings.

Let’s talk about Milton Friedman’s magnum opus of moral bankruptcy: the idea that a corporation’s only legitimate purpose is maximizing shareholder value. It’s the perfect intellectual cover for what would otherwise be recognized as sociopathic behavior. Consider for a moment what we’ve done here: we’ve created artificial persons in corporations, handed them immense power and legal protections, and then—unlike every other person in society—told them they have precisely one moral obligation: make more money for people who already have money.

If you encountered a flesh-and-blood person who justified every self-serving action without regard to anyone or anything else, you wouldn’t call them a “wealth creator”—you’d call them a dangerous sociopath. Someone who feels perfectly justified leaving destruction in their wake as long as it benefits them personally would be considered a menace to society, possibly institutionalized. Yet when corporations do exactly this, we don’t just tolerate it—we celebrate it as the highest form of economic virtue.

The wealthy elite loves this arrangement because it provides both financial gain and emotional insulation from the consequences of their avarice. By delegating their dirty work to faceless corporations, they can deposit the checks while maintaining plausible deniability about the communities destroyed, the workers discarded, and the environments poisoned. “Don’t blame me,” says the investor collecting dividends from prison labor, “I’m just following the market’s invisible hand!” How convenient that this invisible hand never seems to slap them in the face.

Friedman’s shareholder maximization concept has allowed and encouraged the incarnation of evil manifest through corporations, supported by a rentier class that now has both the gains from this activity and the emotional insulation from the evil that they do. It’s moral outsourcing at its finest—all of the profit, none of the guilt!

Worker representation on corporate boards isn’t some radical socialist fantasy—it’s standard practice in Germany, where workers hold up to half the seats on supervisory boards of large companies. This “co-determination” model hasn’t destroyed German capitalism; it’s created one of the world’s most successful manufacturing economies, with higher wages, better job security, and more innovation than the American approach of treating workers as disposable costs.

Community impact requirements would recognize that corporations don’t exist in a vacuum—they depend on public infrastructure, educated workforces, and stable communities. When a factory that received tax breaks and infrastructure support from a town for decades suddenly relocates to capture slightly higher short-term returns, that’s not just business—it’s a betrayal of the implicit social contract that made the business possible in the first place.

Co-determination models have succeeded across Europe not just in terms of worker wellbeing, but in long-term corporate performance. Companies with worker representation tend to invest more in research and development, maintain higher quality standards, and take a longer-term view of success. They’re less likely to engage in short-sighted cost-cutting that boosts quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term sustainability.

The idea that corporations should operate solely to maximize shareholder returns ignores the reality that corporations are legal constructs created by society, through government, to serve broader economic purposes. They exist by public permission and receive enormous benefits, from limited liability to legal personhood. Requiring them to consider their full impact isn’t punishment—it’s asking them to live up to the social contract that gives them their privileges in the first place.

If we wouldn’t accept “but it made me richer” as a moral justification from an individual who harmed others, why do we accept it from the artificial persons we’ve created? This isn’t just an economic question—it’s a moral one that gets to the heart of what kind of society we want to build.

Progressive Taxation

Jeff works at an Amazon warehouse, walking 15 miles a day in a non-air-conditioned facility while timed bathroom breaks are logged against his productivity metrics. He pays a higher effective tax rate than his employer did during years when it reported billions in profits. When he asks how this is possible, financial experts explain the sophisticated “tax strategies” that allow the wealthiest corporations and individuals to legally avoid what ordinary workers can’t. This isn’t a broken system—it’s working exactly as designed.

The genius of modern conservatism is convincing working Americans that billionaires need protection from tax collectors. What started with Reagan’s “welfare queen” mythology has evolved into a religion where the ultra-wealthy are treated as a protected class, their fortunes somehow more sacrosanct than the lives of those who can’t afford insulin.

Our tax code reads like it was written by oligarchs—because it was. The carried interest loophole lets hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Corporations build headquarters in Ireland while using American infrastructure. Billionaires borrow against their stock portfolios to avoid ever selling shares and triggering capital gains taxes. It’s not evasion; it’s “strategy.”

The estate tax—rebranded as the “death tax” in a marketing coup that Don Draper would envy—has been gutted to the point where dynastic wealth passes from generation to generation virtually untouched. The architects of American democracy understood the dangers of aristocracy. Today’s politicians understand the benefits of aristocratic campaign donations.

A wealth tax isn’t radical—what’s radical is allowing three men to own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined. What’s radical is watching teachers pay higher effective tax rates than billionaires. What’s radical is accepting a system where Amazon can pay zero federal income tax in years when it made billions in profit.

The “job creator” mythology serves as the modern equivalent of divine right—a religious justification for why certain people deserve to control nation-state levels of wealth while others work full-time jobs and still need food stamps. When workers demand higher wages, they’re told it would destroy jobs. When executives demand nine-figure compensation packages, they’re “attracting top talent.”

Public Internet and Digital Commons

Diego used to shop at locally owned stores, read news from independent journalists, and socialize in community spaces. Now he buys everything through Amazon, gets “news” from algorithmic feeds optimized to keep him angry and engaged, and maintains relationships through platforms that track and monetize his every interaction. This didn’t happen because digital options are inherently better—it happened because a handful of companies have monopolized the digital square, capturing both commerce and communication.

The internet—created through public investment, developed in public institutions, and initially operated as a commons—has been captured by a handful of corporations that have transformed it from a democratic space into a series of extraction points. The promise of digital democracy has been replaced by surveillance capitalism, where we’re both product and consumer.

Municipal broadband offers communities the opportunity to treat internet service as essential infrastructure rather than a profit center. Cities like Chattanooga have demonstrated that publicly owned networks can deliver faster speeds at lower prices while reaching underserved areas private companies won’t touch. The response from telecom monopolies? Lobbying for state laws to ban municipal broadband, ensuring that neither public options nor actual competition can threaten their extraction model.

Digital public spaces not driven by surveillance and engagement optimization aren’t some utopian fantasy—they’re the original vision of the internet. Platforms designed to serve users rather than advertisers, networks that connect without manipulating, communities governed by members rather than algorithms optimized for time-on-site—these alternatives exist but are systematically marginalized by the dominant players.

Data rights frameworks recognize that the information generated by our digital lives shouldn’t automatically become the property of corporations. The European GDPR, for all its flaws, at least attempts to establish that people have rights regarding information about them. In America, we’ve allowed companies to claim ownership of data they merely collected, not created, enabling surveillance and manipulation on an unprecedented scale.

Creating a public internet doesn’t require nationalizing Facebook or Google. It requires investing in alternative infrastructure, establishing proper regulation, enforcing antitrust laws, protecting data rights, and fostering the development of non-extractive alternatives. It requires recognizing that communication networks have always required public governance to serve the common good.

The Path Forward

The policies outlined above aren’t revolutionary—they’re restorative. They would return us to the more balanced capitalism that produced America’s greatest period of widespread prosperity. They would rebuild the middle class that decades of extractive policies have hollowed out. And they would create a society where democracy isn’t just a ritual we perform on Election Day, but a reality we live in our communities and workplaces.

The Four Horsemen policies we explored in the previous chapter would shift power dynamics within the existing system. The additional policies outlined here would transform the system itself, creating the conditions for a truly democratic economy and society. Together, they offer not just a critique of what’s wrong, but a vision of what’s possible when we break the chokepoints of concentrated power.