Post-Scarcity Was Always Possible
They Just Hid the Inheritance
This may come as close to the real world as we’ll ever get in this series. But if the concepts we explore are going to mean anything—if we’re going to build credible futures—I need a framework grounded in real-world financial physics. Even imagination has to obey the laws of nature where they’re known, at least for me, so that I can freely suspend disbelief in the places we haven’t mapped yet.
The Invention of Scarcity
By the end of the 1970s, America had weathered multiple real shocks: oil embargoes, runaway inflation, war disillusionment, and a growing sense that the post-war dream had lost coherence. But instead of stabilizing the system through shared sacrifice and coordinated reinvestment, a new class of economic strategists chose a different path. They invented scarcity as a cultural weapon for mass behavioral control, particularly aimed at redefining public expectations and limiting collective demands.
Under this new model, we were told the state could no longer afford grand ambitions. Safety nets became burdens. Public education, housing, and healthcare were rebranded as luxuries. The narrative shifted subtly but deliberately: From "we take care of our people" to "you’re on your own."
It was framed as fiscal realism. But it was political engineering. The message was that we needed to work harder to earn better lives. The reality was that they wanted us to work harder so they could extract more value while giving less in return.
Engineering the Extraction Economy
Scarcity, as it turns out, is profitable—if you’re holding the access gates.
The policy shift began with the Volcker Shock: An intentional spike in interest rates that broke inflation, crushed wage bargaining power, and wiped out millions of small businesses and family farms. It was followed by:
The breaking of organized labor (PATCO strike, 1981)
Deregulation of finance and energy markets
Legalization of stock buybacks in 1982
Drastic reductions in top marginal tax rates
Defunding of public housing, education, and urban infrastructure
In short, it was a comprehensive restructuring of who the economy served. Growth no longer translated into shared wealth. It was siphoned upward.
Mostly, this dismantled the mechanisms of the New Deal. Those hard-won safeguards that ensured the wealthy paid proportionally and contributed meaningfully to society. It was those structures that had once made it realistic to imagine the Great Society not as aspiration, but as trajectory.
The Proof They Can’t Deny
Before 1980, wages and productivity rose in lockstep. Workers produced more, and they earned more.
After 1980, the two lines diverged. Productivity kept rising. Compensation flattened. The gap between them—the stolen surplus—was absorbed by corporate profits, CEO compensation, and speculative finance.
By 2023, the Economic Policy Institute estimated this divergence had shifted nearly $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
This is not theoretical. It’s not about effort, merit, or genius. It’s math.
The government and its policies have been repurposed to redirect newly created wealth away from those who produce it, and toward large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals, ensuring that the value of our labor benefits them more than us.
The Wealth Still Exists
Despite claims that "the money's already spent," much of that extracted wealth still exists. It's parked in:
Offshore tax havens
Multinational real estate portfolios
Luxury goods and status artifacts (yachts, rare art, and other personal prestige vehicles)
Inherited dynasties that have never worked a day
It hasn’t vanished. It has been removed from circulation, frankly, hoarded. That means it can be reclaimed.
Not through confiscation. Through policy.
There have been losses along the way: Failed financial engineering schemes, cycles of boom and bust. These self-inflicted disasters routinely lead the architects of collapse to demand that We the People bail them out. Reimbursing their bad bets with public funds, even though the capital they risked was built from the value they extracted from us in the first place.
The Sickness of Kings
In a healthy system, wealth concentrates around those who improve the lives of others. In our system, it concentrates around those best able to exploit regulatory loopholes, suppress competition, and manipulate political machinery.
As outlined in The Sickness of Kings, the very traits that lead to power under extractive capitalism are often the inverse of what makes someone a wise steward. Narcissism, paranoia, and emotional detachment become assets.
It is not that billionaires are smarter. It’s that they are more useful to the system that chooses them. And that system does not reward contribution. It rewards control.
Our society was intended to be of, by, and for We the People. We are not passengers in the economy; we are the engine. The New Deal attempted to codify that truth, aligning prosperity with contribution. A true post-scarcity framework would go further: Not just ensuring a fair share of what we create, but redesigning the system so that creation itself serves everyone by default.
Fair Taxation and Clawback: Both Are Necessary
There are two interlocking components to a just economic future:
Clawback is not optional. It is remuneration for decades of systemic theft. Windfall taxes on pandemic profiteering, estate taxation on dynastic fortunes, and targeted levies on hoarded capital are not punitive—they're reparative.
Fair Taxation sets the new rules. It re-establishes the social contract going forward: Progressive marginal rates, labor-capital tax parity, and transaction-based friction for speculative finance.
This isn’t a choice between the two. Clawback addresses the past; fair taxation governs the future. One heals the damage. The other prevents recurrence.
The latter was standard policy during America's mid-20th century boom. We had fewer tools then—less automation, less productive output per hour, and higher costs per capita.
And yet, even in that era, the government managed to:
Build the Interstate Highway System
Create Medicare and Medicaid
Invest in NASA and fundamental research
Expand public education
We were less efficient then. And we still did it.
And all of those things created the widespread prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s; the very decades many now look back on with longing. Yet even as that memory is evoked for political gain, voters are encouraged to support policies that dismantle the very mechanisms that made that prosperity possible. The result is predictable: More taken from the public, more hardship for We the People, and more insulation for those sailing through the chaos in luxury.
What If People Stop Working?
One of the myths richest Americans love to spread is that without financial coercion, nobody would work. It betrays how they see the rest of us: As fundamentally lazy unless punished.
But this reveals a psychological projection. It is not uncommon for those who wield unearned power to assume others would behave as selfishly as they do if given the chance. Rather than admit their own aversion to labor, they construct systems to ensure others remain trapped in toil they themselves avoid.
But history tells a different story.
In tribal and gift economies, contribution was cultural, not coerced.
In modern pilot programs with basic income, most people kept working.
In post-disaster mutual aid networks, strangers work tirelessly without pay.
Humans seek purpose, not just pay.
The fact is that even in the 1950s we were remarkably productive for the era. The policies of the New Deal helped translate that productivity into broad-based prosperity. And counter to elite assumptions, people often work harder when they have stability—because they have room to pursue excellence instead of mere survival.
The myth that people only work under threat is not just a deflection, it's a mechanism of control. It exists to convince the public that the luxury of security must remain exclusive. But the record shows: Prosperity expands when fear recedes.
This myth also cultivates resentment toward anyone who steps outside the system of toil, even modestly. People who choose to work less—because they can afford to, or because they prioritize time over income—are framed as freeloaders. Historically, hierarchies have weaponized this dynamic: Using one class of the oppressed to discipline the others. In past centuries, this included enslaved people forced to enforce the labor of fellow captives. Today, it's economic precarity that enlists the overworked to police the underemployed. It is not coincidence. It is strategic conditioning.
What Could We Afford If We Taxed Fairly?
Restoring fair taxation, not even extreme, just New Deal levels, would generate an additional $2.5 to $4 trillion annually without increasing debt.
With that, we could fully fund:
Universal healthcare: A system built to provide care as needed, not to extract profit. It would eliminate gatekeeping, reduce chronic stress, and improve long-term outcomes for everyone.
Tuition-free public college: An education system that sees knowledge as infrastructure. When more people are trained to think critically and build skillfully, society becomes more capable, more adaptable, and more equitable.
Clean energy infrastructure: Not just solar panels and batteries, but a public commitment to breathable air, safe water, and reliable power that doesn't depend on global instability or environmental collapse.
National childcare programs: Structured early education and caregiving that foster development, curiosity, and equity. No child hungry. No parent forced to choose between work and care.
Housing-first initiatives: Stable housing as a baseline right. It's not just humane, it's efficient. People with homes are easier to help, healthier to serve, and more likely to re-enter the workforce or community life on their own terms.
And we’d still have room for research, arts, and disaster resilience.
This isn’t utopian fantasy. It’s arithmetic.
We can do all these things and still pay off the debt; debt that was created not to invest in the people, but to enrich those who have always believed they are entitled to more than the rest of us.
And even if a small number choose to work less when given the freedom to do so, history shows that the result isn’t collapse but growth. When people feel secure, they invest more in their communities, explore new ideas, take creative risks, and help build greater wealth for all.
The point is not to choose between justice for the past and progress for the future. We must pursue both. Clawback is remuneration. Fair taxation is the new standard. And the path forward begins with reclaiming what is rightfully ours. We the People built this society, and we deserve more than mere survival. We deserve a share in what we created.
The Inheritance They Hid
We are not poor. We are rich in output, in ingenuity, in human capacity.
We are only poor in policy. Not because of natural limits, but because we allowed our representation to be co-opted by those who serve wealth instead of the public good. That wasn't a flaw in the people; it was a success of the system designed to obscure who benefits. But now, the consequences are visible. The thread is unraveling. And it's time to take back the power that was always meant to be ours.
This is our society. It was built by our labor, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our caretakers. And what they stole from us wasn’t just money. It was the future we were supposed to live in.
That future is still possible. But not if we keep pretending it’s unaffordable.
They didn’t earn this world. We built it.
And it's time to take it back.
This is Ronald Reagan's shining city on the hill—but this time it is for all of us, not just them.