How the morbidly rich are sabotaging the very system that made them wealthy

Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
August 20, 2024 

Rich man lighting cigar with $100 bill (Shutterstock)

Recently, a reporter spoke with one of the chief architects of Project 2025 using a hidden camera and microphone and learned they’re still in tight with Trump, still planning to run his administration if he’s elected, still planning to gut the guardrails America has placed around capitalism over the past 100 years, and even planning to “pull the ladder up” to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America.

Their plan relies on a major reinvention of modern capitalism and is being pushed by people suffering from an identifiable metal illness. To see how they’re hoping to pull this off, it’s important and necessary to first understand that there are two types of capitalism: raw and regulated.

Raw capitalism — sometimes referred to as Laissez-faire (“leave alone”) or “unregulated” capitalism — reflects the very essence of predatory activity. As any Libertarian can proudly tell you, the only rule is that no capitalist can commit fraud against another capitalist and the only role for government is to provide a stable currency and a court system to prosecute fraud.

Raw capitalism could be called the law of the jungle; only the strong survive, and those who are the most ruthless and cutthroat end up with all the money and power while everybody else stands on the outside looking in. It favors psychopathy in the executive suite.

A handful of families, typically one for each industry, end up fabulously wealthy while their companies monopolize market sectors to keep new entrants and entrepreneurs out.

Workers, at the bottom of the hierarchy, are screwed: no unions are allowed, wages reflect how desperate working people are, and consumers live in a caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) world where ripoffs are common, food and products are often dangerous, and the environment is poisoned to keep cleanup costs low and thus profits high.

Raw capitalism is how most of the world ran until the first decades of the 20th century. You can read the story of it in most of Dickens’ novels. By the 1880s-1920s era, it had made a handful of families (Rockefellers/oil, Carnegie/steel, Vanderbilt/railroads, Astor/real estate, Armour/meatpacking, Morgan/banking, DuPont/chemicals, etc.) mind-bogglingly rich and succeeded in limiting the middle class to about 10 percent of Americans, mostly doctors, lawyers, and shopkeepers. Everybody else was dirt poor.

Regulated capitalism is an altogether different animal that expands a capitalist system to aid workers and consumers as well as capitalists.

With regulated capitalism, the rules of capitalism are expanded to benefit all of society, rather than exclusively the capitalists themselves. While it was championed in Adam Smith’s books A Theory of Moral Sentimentsand Wealth of Nations(1776), and highlighted repeatedly by David Ricardo five decades later, it didn’t really come into fruition until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His embrace of Keynesian economics transformed America and, ultimately, the entire free world.

President Roosevelt, when accepting his renomination in 1936, took on the advocates of raw capitalism — which had run the world just four years earlier — head-on:
“[O]ut of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.”

It was a radical separation from the old order, and his audience cheered wildly as they realized FDR wanted to make capitalism, and America, a fairer and more compassionate nation.

“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.”

He challenged the most powerful men and companies in America, promising to strip them of the power to write laws and control politicians that they’d enjoyed for over a century. He called them out and took them on.
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

And he pointed out how this corrupt system of raw capitalism had destroyed opportunity in America for average people while making a small group of “princes” richer than the kings of old.
“Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.”

Roosevelt beat the oligarchs and was successful in bringing regulated capitalism to America. His policies included the right of workers to unionize, aggressive enforcement of the nation’s new anti-monopoly laws, high levels of taxation on profits and great wealth, and consumer and worker protections guaranteed by government.

The result was the world’s first middle class that included more than half of all citizens.

Donald Trump, JD Vance, their billionaire donors, six Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Project 2025 have declared war on Roosevelt’s regulated capitalism; they want to turn the clock back to the raw capitalism Gilded Age of the 1920s by stripping regulatory agencies out of government, cutting taxes on the morbidly rich, and ending protections for labor.

Russell Vought was the guy who put Donald Trump's executive order banning the teaching of Black history (“CRT”) and other diversity training for federal employees into place when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now he’s a principal architect of Project 2025 and the lead cheerleader for ending regulated capitalism and reverting to raw capitalism.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in the secretly-taped recording. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”

In this effort, and the Supreme Court’s recent destruction of the Chevron Deference that authorized regulatory agencies to protect workers, consumers, and the environment, these reactionary (arguably “revolutionary”) Republicans are trying to pull up the ladder so a new generation of entrepreneurs will face a wall of monopolies and other barriers to achieving business success.

They are trying to gut the very system that created a large enough middle class to provide customers for their products, thus making them rich. They want to return us to the era of FDR’s libertarian “economic royalists,” an effort that will impoverish America just as it has every other country that’s tried it (Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, etc.).

When psychologist Eric Fromm identified people as having either a “doing” or a “being” orientation, he nailed the personality characteristics of the billionaires and their well-paid toadies who’re promoting this dystopian future for America.

He argued that there’s a specific “hoarder” personality afflicted with a compulsion to constantly accumulate more, more, more stuff. When they’re poor, their apartments fill up with newspapers and tin cans. When they’re rich, their money bins fill up with cash.

In either case, they’re mentally ill and perpetually miserable. If they’re rich enough, their mental illness causes them to mercilessly exploit others for their own gain.

This is the psychology of this generation of wannabee economic royalists, and their plan to replace regulated capitalism with the old laissez-faire system will also destroy the remnants of the American middle class that FDR created.

We can’t let them get away with inflicting their mental illness on the rest of us. Double-check your voter registration and show up this fall!