I can only try and teach you how I think, and why. Failing that, all I can do is point out that I have not arrived at these conclusions lightly, that they are the result of my cultural and family background, my education, my experience and a long and introspective life. I have nothing to gain by changing your mind, and nothing to lose by failing to do so.

Not only are there many similarities between contemporary life and the Gilded Age, there is a concerted and organized effort to roll back a century of progress and move us back to that era. And who is working like crazy to bring this about? None other than those traditional robber barons and their mindless worshippers who are convinced they will profit by it, the scholars and philosophers who subscribe to that perverse nostalgia, the political parties that count on those reactionaries as their constituency, and the religious demagogues who will shamelessly follow any flag that promises them license to commit their spiritual crimes.

Those who would prosper by this reaction, who desire to return to a world of unrestricted (and socially acceptable) rapine and plunder have taken advantage of the general and widespread realization that this new economy we've created does not serve us all equally well. It also exploits and promotes the naive myth in our population that it is some treacherous Other, some foreign, racially distinct, culturally alien, religiously corrupt conspiracy of minorities led by a haughty elite that is the actual threat to our freedom and our prosperity. The conflation of these two concepts is no accident. In fact, it is a deliberate plan advanced with clever propaganda devised by clever social engineers and supported by limitless funding. A return to 19th century economic models is being carried out by a promotion of 19th century social and political lies. The two go hand in hand, arm in arm, they are joined at the hip and walk side by side in a harsh and coordinated goose step.

The free market is a wonderful idea, it should never be abandoned and should be supported and promoted, but it is being turned into a distraction that obscures what is really going on. But it never was an inevitable result of simply leaving the system alone and allowing Natural Law to take over and stabilize it. Like Freedom itself, it is a fragile and weak system that must be constantly supported and defended from avarice and vice.

The effort to pervert this Freedom is not some new technological or ideological corruption that now stalks the world. It is a simple lust for wealth and power

And that is older than Babylon and evil as hell.

"What grinds my gears is how some economists often treat economics as if it is a natural science with observable laws that have passed through the rigor of the scientific method. To be crystal clear, the problem is not economics itself, the problem is when it crystallizes into dogma, which can then be used to uphold exploitative systems of labor."