In a capitalistic society, all wealth slowly but surely trickles to the top 1%. This is not a mistake or mere luck. It is the result of a specially programmed system. It all started with one of the richest people in the world, John D. Rockefeller, and his father who went by the nickname “Devil Bill”. He placed immense pressure on his son. He showed him that the world is a “bad, bad place” and that to survive, he should be too.

“I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make them sharp!” he famously said. The most legendary story of Devil Bill’s parenting involves a physical trust lesson. He would tell his young sons to jump from a chair or a high porch into his arms. Just as they were about to land, he would step back and let them crash to the floor. “Remember, never trust anyone” he would tell them. Devil Bill would dress in the finest suits, rent the best hotel rooms, and call himself by a fake name “Dr. Levingston.” He taught his sons that perception is reality. If you look like a million dollars, people will give you their last cent.

The story of the Rockefellers is important because they spent their fortunes creating a school system perfect for their needs. They made sure to create the “perfect worker”, one who listens to commands, doesn’t think for themselves, and will never be competition. That is why we don’t learn anything about money in school, even though school exists to help us get a job, and a job exists to make money. If you learn about finances, you become direct competition to the elites. However, if you don’t, you remain the perfect employee. You work or die.

Moreover, with the growth of the U.S. government and massive corporate lobbying, President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard in 1971. The world followed. Nowadays, money is printed on a staggering scale. All of this money goes first to corporations and banks. They can spend it before inflation hits, destroying the purchasing power of currencies, causing real wages to drop and melting people’s cash savings. However, the rich don’t hold cash, they buy by nature inflation proof investments that actually increase in value as inflation rises. Furthermore, banks, governments, and the wealthy hold a lot of debt, and inflation is actually beneficial to them. They need to pay back much less than they borrowed.

A further increase in the wealth gap happened in 1980. President Reagan persuaded the American public that if they lowered taxes on the rich, more money would be left for everyday people. Because wealthy people would share their money with them. However they never did. From then on, the wealthy paid approximately 80% less in taxes than before. That started the greatest era of inequality for Western countries in modern history. With less money to the government, the poor were left helpless. Which we can observe in the homelessness, addiction and no free health care in the USA.

Currently, the most successful investors worldwide are not even from the field of finance or economics. Surprisingly or not, they are politicians using insider information to trade on the financial markets. For instance Nancy Pelosi has made so much money trading stocks using insider information that it would take her roughly 700 years to earn that amount from her high paying political salary alone.

Luckily, we don’t live in the medieval ages, and information is widely available. Super investors like Warren Buffett or Ray Dalio share their knowledge for free. You can read a book or watch a YouTube video. Being rich is not evil, they want you to believe it is so that you will never try to compete with them. Fight back, educate yourself, and take ownership of your life and your money. Make money work for you. The capitalistic system can benefit everyone, even the poorest person. You need to learn how it works. Of course, the system is flawed, but we are here to make a change and not to follow Devil Bill’s vision for your slave life. 

Piotr Mucha

Sources:

“Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.” by Ron Chernow
“The Underground History of American Education” by John Taylor Gatto
“The Nixon Shock at 50” Federal Reserve History
wtfhappenedin1971.com – charts of how wages and productivity decoupled unusualwhales.com – “Congressional Trading Report”