THE SYSTEM HAS NO REVERSE

Half of America just named cost of living as their biggest personal challenge. Healthcare costs, rent, groceries, childcare, gas. The basics. That’s what’s breaking people financially and emotionally.

Friday I wrote about how we lowered our expectations. This one is about the machine that made that permanent.

The economy we’re living inside wasn’t built with a reverse gear. It doesn’t go backwards. Prices don’t come down. Not in any systemic way. The only time prices actually fall is during a collapse. A depression. A crash. And when that happens, the wealthy swoop in and gobble up everything the rest of us built for pennies on the dollar. That’s the only reverse this system has. Pain for us, opportunity for them.

When inflation spiked to 9%, the Federal Reserve had exactly one tool. Make people poorer. Raise interest rates. Cool the housing market. Kill jobs. Make it harder to borrow. The theory is simple—if people have less money, they’ll buy less stuff, and prices will stop going up as fast.

That doesn’t bring prices back down. It just slows how fast they’re rising. The 20-25% price jump from 2021-22? That’s permanent. Baked in. Your groceries aren’t going back to what they cost in 2019. Your rent isn’t going back. Nothing is going back.

And nobody went to jail for it. Companies that gouged us during the pandemic—jacking up prices on everything from eggs to medical supplies because they could—faced no prosecution. No consequences. They pocketed record profits while we absorbed the pain. Then, during the brief window when workers actually had some leverage, when unemployment was low and people were quitting bad jobs and wages started rising, CEOs went on television and complained that workers were getting “too much power.” The power dynamic was “shifting too far.”

They said that out loud. On camera.

The system is built to prevent wages from rising too fast, to prevent workers from gaining leverage, to prevent any restoration of the purchasing power we’ve lost. When wages go up, the machine treats it like a malfunction and corrects. When corporations gouge, it’s just the market at work.

Trump recently called affordability “a Democratic Party hoax.” He’s half right. The hoax isn’t that people are struggling—that’s real. The hoax is that either party has a plan to fix it. Trump says he’s going to cut energy prices in half. Democrats say they’re going to make housing affordable. What mechanism exists to do that? Tariffs don’t lower prices. Deregulation doesn’t lower prices. Subsidies don’t lower prices—they just shift who pays.

We’ve been filling holes in affordability with welfare programs and tax credits for decades. The prices just rise to absorb the subsidy. We give people housing vouchers, landlords raise rents. We subsidize college, tuition explodes. We pump money into healthcare, costs spiral. The extraction economy sees government assistance as just another revenue stream.

This is why only 54% of Americans now view capitalism favorably—the lowest number Gallup has ever recorded. Why 62% of young people have a favorable view of socialism. They’re not reading Marx. They’re looking at their bank accounts and their rent and their grocery receipts and concluding, correctly, that whatever this system is, it isn’t working for them.

People look back at the 1930s through the 1970s as proof that the American economy can work for regular people. They’re right—that era was real. But they misremember what made it possible.

That wasn’t liberalism. It damn sure wasn’t neoliberalism. It was illiberal. Planning. The state deciding what got built, where, and at what price.

The New Deal, the war economy, the post-war boom—these weren’t achievements of the free market being gently regulated. They happened because the government decided outcomes mattered more than market purity. Tax and build, not just tax and spend. The state didn’t just write checks and hope. It built things directly. It entered markets as a competitor. It told entire industries what they were going to produce.

During World War II, the government didn’t incentivize aircraft production with tax credits. The Defense Plant Corporation built the factories—owned 90% of the nation’s synthetic rubber capacity, aircraft plants, and magnesium production—and leased them to contractors. The War Production Board told Ford they weren’t making cars anymore. They were making bombers. Period.

The TVA wasn’t a subsidy for rural electricity. It was the federal government entering the energy market as a direct competitor to private utilities. The government seized land, dammed rivers, and sold power at cost to force modernization on a region the market had written off.

The government forced companies to share patents. The 1956 consent decree against AT&T made Bell Labs license the transistor—the foundation of the entire modern tech industry—to anyone who asked, royalty-free. They didn’t negotiate. They didn’t offer incentives. They said this knowledge is too important to be hoarded.

Marginal tax rates hit 90%. That’s not a typo. That’s not tweaking incentives. That’s a functional cap on wealth accumulation.

This was not the free market. This was the state saying the outcome—winning the war, building the middle class, electrifying the country—matters more than the sanctity of the market process. Communism and socialism were genuine competitors on the world stage. The threat was existential. So we put market ideology on pause and actually built things.

That’s the era everyone wants to go back to. And we convinced ourselves it happened because of the market, not in spite of it.

We spent the next fifty years restoring market supremacy and calling it freedom. Exposed industries to global competition without protecting workers. Stripped the state of its capacity to build. Privatized everything we could. Reduced the government to a blindfolded referee—like some WWF bullshit where the ref conveniently misses every illegal move by the guy corporate wants to win.

The economy we have now isn’t a corruption of some natural order. It’s the market order restored. Private property sacred. Investors first. Government as spectator. The system working exactly as designed.

This comes down to supply. Who creates it. Who owns it. Who controls how it gets distributed.

Public competition. Not replacing the private sector. Competing with it. Building public capacity that delivers services at cost—no extraction, no administrative bloat dedicated to denying claims, no CEO packages that would make a Roman emperor blush.

Take healthcare. We don’t need a public option for the insurance part. We need public hospitals, public clinics, public care. The actual medicine. Insurance is just a way to pool money when you can’t afford things on your own. America is rich enough to be self-insured. When companies get big enough, that’s exactly what they do—cut out the middleman and handle it in-house. We’re the richest country in history. We can do the same thing.

Public broadband. Public housing development. Public energy. When there’s a public competitor in the market, the private sector has to actually compete on price. They can’t just keep extracting forever if there’s a public option delivering the same thing for less.

The budgets are public. The decision-makers are elected. You can show up to a city council meeting and ask questions. Try doing that with the private equity firm that bought your local hospital.

The last time we actually built a middle class, we did it by building things ourselves. The state entered markets as a competitor and a builder, not a blindfolded referee handing out tax credits and hoping for the best. Outcomes mattered more than ideology.

The system has no reverse. It never did. If we want affordability back, we have to build the supply ourselves.

Corbin Trent