How to Unf*ck America: Part 6 - The Economy

By Rob C.

Art by Pat Bagley

TL;DR: America doesn’t have a “free market.” It has a rigged casino run by billionaires, policed by lobbyists, and sanctified by think tanks funded by people who wouldn’t last ten minutes on the same economic planet as the rest of us. If we want an economy that works for actual human beings—and not just hedge funds, tax cheats, and the disciples of Milton Friedman—we need to un-brainwash ourselves from 80 years of corporate mythology and reclaim the democratic economy FDR built. Until then, enjoy losing in a game you never agreed to play.

How to Unf*ck America: The Economy

(Special edition: Our Free Market Fairy Tale)

For nearly a century, America has been force-fed the gospel of “free markets”—a religion created not by economists or philosophers but by the National Association of Manufacturers’ PR department. Yes, really. As meticulously documented in The Big Myth, corporate titans spent the 20th century financing a propaganda blitz so enormous it made Orwell look like an optimist. The goal? Convince everyday Americans that any form of regulation is tyranny, any corporate accountability is communism, and any attempt to ensure economic fairness is a gulag starter kit.

And it worked. Boy, did it work.

So here we are, decades later, with millions of people still insisting that unregulated capitalism equals “freedom,” as though freedom is defined by how easily ExxonMobil or Comcast can pick your pocket.

You’d almost think Americans had never read a basic comparison of capitalism vs. socialism vs. communism—which, lucky for us, I happen to write about at length in Democracy for Sale. Spoiler: capitalism can coexist with democracy… but only when government keeps capitalists from turning the entire country into their own private Hunger Games arena. Without those guardrails, capitalism morphs—shockingly—into monopoly, exploitation, and an economic system where the winners write the rulebook and the losers get blamed for breaking them.

The Stock Market: America’s Favorite Hallucination

Next, let’s talk about the stock market—the magical, glowing scoreboard that politicians use to pretend the economy is doing great.

The stock market is not the economy. It is not even adjacent to the economy. It is a speculative casino where about 10% of Americans own 90% of the individual stocks, and the rest of us get to watch CNBC hosts celebrate a “record-breaking day” while we’re choosing between groceries and the electric bill.

The “shareholder economy” is the fever dream in which workers don’t matter, communities don’t matter, long-term stability doesn’t matter—only quarterly profits matter. CEOs slash wages, outsource jobs, raid pensions, and jack up prices… and Wall Street cheers like it’s the Super Bowl halftime show.

Then politicians point to this rigged spectacle and say, “Look! The economy is thriving!”

Yeah, thriving like a parasite.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans don’t own a single share of anything except stress.

Stop Subsidizing Corporate Royalty

Why do we shovel taxpayer money into the gaping maws of corporations already making billions?

Why is Amazon—one of the richest companies in the history of human civilization—still getting tax breaks from states competing to grovel the hardest?

Why can fossil fuel companies write off entire kingdoms worth of “investments” while also melting the planet?

Why are we subsidizing fast-food giants whose business model includes paying workers so little they qualify for welfare?

A basic rule of adulthood is: If you can afford your own 747, you can pay your own bills.
Yet somehow, “corporate welfare reform” is treated as more controversial than banning lead in baby food.

Here’s a radical idea:

• Stop subsidizing massively profitable corporations.

• Cap how much “investment” can be written off when that “investment” is just stock buybacks in a Halloween mask.

• Require fair business practices—like actually paying taxes and not using workers as disposable napkins.

None of this is complicated. All of this is doable. And every bit of it is deliberately avoided by a political system colonized by mega-donors.

The Winner-Take-All Economy: Spoiler, You’re the Loser

The United States has built an economy where winning means taking everything and losing means… being everyone else.

But it wasn’t always this way.

In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt constructed what I call America’s first democratic economy—one where workers shared in prosperity, corporations were regulated, unions had power, wages rose with productivity, and the middle class became the largest the world had ever seen.

FDR proved that when you give ordinary people economic rights—not just corporate titans—you get a stable and prosperous nation.

You know what we have now?
A “trickle-down” hallucination pitched by wealthy donors, enforced by right-wing think tanks, and repeated by politicians who pretend tax cuts grow jobs and deregulation creates freedom.

In reality, it’s a winner-take-all economy where the winners take all and the losers argue over pronouns.

To unf*ck the economy, we need to unf*ck the ideology running it.
That starts by remembering this:
We built an economy that worked once.
We can do it again.

And if we don’t?
Well… let’s just say billionaires will continue doing great. The rest of us will keep getting a masterclass in suffering that they call “freedom.”

If you enjoyed this piece, hit the like button, share it, tattoo it on the nearest libertarian economist, or simply forward it to someone who still thinks the stock market reflects the economy.

Robert Cain, is author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet