Browse around the internet a bit and you’ll see plenty of articles complaining about capitalism, or maybe “late-stage” capitalism, or “American-style capitalism”, or some such variant. It’s killing us, they say, or it’s killing the planet, or it’s enslaving us, or making us miserable, and so on. And to tell the truth… they are not wrong. However, read a few of these, and you may start to notice something… very few of them seem to offer any alternatives, which is odd, because the answers really aren’t all that difficult; we have just become so focused on our own desperate condition that we forget to look forward to the next step. Or perhaps it is just that we have been slowly conditioned by the small minority of people profiting from the current system to see any alternatives as some kind of dangerous extremism. Well, it’s time to step out of the bubble.


Now, before we can understand the solutions (and yeah, I realize the irony here), we need to understand the problems. So what is capitalism anyway, and why is it such a bad thing? Well, capitalism is just a type of economic system, which is a way of determining how the goods and services produced by society will be distributed. In a “pure” capitalist system, the government does not take any role at all in distributing goods and services; these are distributed based entirely on a system of money. Those who have money can trade it for goods and services, and those who do not can trade goods (if they have them) and services (if they are able) for money. In its purest form, the government simply exists to ensure that the market is fair, or that in other words, that nobody can take someone else’s money or goods or services without consensual compensation. Or in other words, the government mostly exists to protect the rich (those who have things) from the poor (those who do not).

This system can work fairly well in some situations, and to be fair, it got us to where we are now, but it has at least two major flaws, and unfortunately these tend to amplify over time. First, the system places no value on nature and environment, and second, its “fairness” assumes that everyone starts out on some kind of equal playing field, which is nowhere near true.

In the pure capitalist system, and still pretty much anywhere today, there is no value in leaving natural resources in the ground. Value is only created when nature is destroyed and turned into some kind of product, and landowners can choose to destroy their land at will in order to generate wealth. This might not be an issue on an infinite world, but that is not the reality we live in. In reality, we are eating up the land much faster than it can heal itself, which in turn is leading to a global catastrophe and environmental collapse, and there is nothing in the economic system that is designed to prevent this.

Of course, this is only the human side of the equation. However, we don’t ever hear the other side, and for a reason. Capitalism does not give animals a voice in whether or not they should be killed and eaten or their homes destroyed and turned into toilet paper, because they have no money.

Next, we have inequality. If everyone started with exactly the same amount of land and money and abilities, the system might not be so bad, but that’s nowhere near the truth. Only a small number of people actually own land, and everyone else basically has to pay them rent in order to be allowed to exist, which means the landowner is constantly getting an inflow of money without having to do anything, and then everyone else has a constant outflow of money that they need to find a way to generate somehow. Over time these differences amplify, as those who own things can use their free wealth to buy more things, and those who don’t own things constantly have to give away the wealth they do manage to produce in order to stay alive. As the inequality gap widens, the market will begin to shift more and more away from producing things for the general population, and towards producing extreme luxuries for rich people, as there is no purpose in trying to sell something to people with no money.

As a side note, it is probably worth reflecting here that if you go back a hundred years or two, the people who owned the land were all white, and those who were not white did not even own themselves. And even if the slaves were freed at some point, if in a capitalist system, you get to leave your wealth to your children, that it’s still mostly the white people sitting back and collecting rents while the non-white folk still all need to hustle to somehow generate money every month.

Now we come to the wasteful nature of capitalism. Since everyone needs to find a way to earn money in order to participate at all in the economic system, the efficiencies that evolve over time never really seem to benefit anyone. Instead of freeing people from labor, it takes away their jobs and forces them to find some way to produce unnecessary things and trick other people into buying them. The only measure of value in this kind of a system is money, which is a pretty poor substitute for happiness. Here we come by the paradox that producing a good, durable product is actually worse that producing a bad, poorly constructed product, as the good product will last forever and only be able to be sold once, while the bad one will break over and over and generate a steady supply of money for the producer… and create jobs.

And yes, forcing people to invent new jobs may in some ways drive innovation, but it drives innovation towards building solutions that have value only for people with money. We now have a near infinite number of innovators creating apps for people to idly waste time on their phones, while at the same time, half the world is starving and lacks basic necessities. Imagine if there were a way to let innovators innovate on the things they thought would matter in the world, and not just endlessly try to chase down cash.

Finally, there is the psychological damage of capitalism. The system is heavily focused on competition (generally for the reason of letting the market determine the correct price or value of everything), but over time, those who have more money can use their money to influence the market and make it harder for smaller competitors to enter it. This means that those who start out with little face a constant struggle to try to find a way to participate in the market, which leads to intense amounts of stress, which takes a devastating toll on the human spirit. And particularly in this new global economy, we as workers are now competing against everyone in the whole world. How can you expect to fight for better wages or safer working conditions or fewer hours if someone in Asia or South America is even poorer and more desperate than you and is willing to do your job for next to nothing?

And of course, this focus on competition creates a dangerous and false mindset that in order for one person to succeed, someone else has to lose. Which has become the new American dream: no longer just succeeding, but winning. When in fact, there is more than enough wealth for everyone to succeed without anyone losing at all. Truth be told, humans achieve more and are happier when they work together than against one another.


So what’s to be done about this then? We did say we were going to discuss solutions here. The serious economic pundits all like to fret and say that nothing can be done, that we are all at the mercy of “market forces” and that capitalist economics is a science, like gravity, that we just have to follow along with and cannot change. This if course, is horseshit. Unlike gravity, economics is not so much like a science as it is a religion. It works because enough people believe it. Or maybe it’s more like the rules for a board game. Imagine if the only game anyone ever played was monopoly, and any time you suggested playing pinochle or tennis or chess or whatever, everyone told you that you were crazy and needed to shut up before we all plunged headlong into chaos. But yeah, the solution is actually just that easy, we just need to change the rules. Monopoly is actually a pretty shitty game (fun fact, it was originally invented to show people how unfair and unstable capitalism was), so we just need to all agree to play something else.

Ok, so economically, how do we change the rules? The answer here is quite simple—government. Capitalism is a system of trade; it contains no inherent code of ethics. The government, on the other hand, is supposed to enforce ethical behavior in society. The government is needed to fill in the gaps in society that the market does not cover, typically because they do not generate revenue. Here is where it always mystifies me when I hear people talk about how the government should be run more like a business, or that it should be run by businessmen—the government is specifically not a business; in fact it is quite the opposite. The government provides necessary goods and services that would otherwise not generate a profit if they were provided by a business. Oh yeah, and that whole ethics thing.

Ok, so now if the government in a society sets the rules for what people and companies can and can’t do, then we just need to adjust the government, and we can change the rules of the game. Now here is where we need to be careful, for the one thing absolutely everyone hates more than capitalism screwing them over is the government telling them what to do, or as I like to call it, losing their self-determination. One reason that people associate things like socialism and even social programs with bad stuff is that often in the past such programs came with massive amounts of government bureaucracy in which people that were being helped were scrutinized, measured, judged, and limited. Some of this (like constantly demonizing people on food stamp programs and trying to micromanage what they can and can’t buy) is probably done deliberately by people that want to scuttle these programs because they happen to be on the winning end of capitalism and don’t want the system to change. Sometimes this is even more insidious (like when the governor requires mandatory drug testing for public assistance recipients, and happens to own the drug testing company that a whole pile of money that could otherwise be used to help more people will now be funneled into). But I digress.

I follow a couple guiding principles on government. The first is this: governments essentially have two powers, the power to help people, and the power to punish people. And the more a government helps people, the less it will have to punish anyone. Secondly (or maybe actually a corollary to the first idea), is that if you want to fight crime, fight poverty. And thirdly, people have the right to self-determination. A good government should adhere to these principles.

So what then is the alternative to capitalism? Well, in short, due to a lack of better terms, it is basically some form of socialism, which is in a general sense a system that tries to maximize the benefits for everyone. And if that scares you, keep in mind that you’ve lived with some kind a socialist government your entire life—free education for example, is a social program designed to offset the inequality inherent in a pure capitalist system. And if you have a problem with education, well then you are an irredeemable idiot, so kindly fuck off and go back to your Ayn Rand reddit forum and leave the rest of us in peace so we can have an adult conversation here.

Ok, so what are some of the other things that our government could do to help offset the problems with capitalism? In a perfect world, it would be nice to be able to do away with money altogether and just move to a system where people can do whatever they want and are simply expected to give away some of the fruits of their labors in life, but we don’t live in a perfect world yet… so we are probably just going to have to change some of the rules regarding money.

So, first up is free healthcare. This is a no-brainer pretty much everywhere in the world except the united states, which seems to be struggling to work its way out from under the giant pile of cash and propaganda that is holding it back. I have free(ish) healthcare here in Norway, and I really have no complaints. Health care ensures the health of all citizens, even those with no money. This has two wonderful advantages for the marketplace, first, it ensures a healthy workforce, and second, it ensures that people can get and stay healthy and thus have the ability to work and earn money. Also, it will save American companies a whole ton of money and hassle, as now they can focus on making movies or furniture or whatever and not on trying to manage a health insurance plan. Also, it will keep the prices from rising. There are a couple reasons that hospitals do not fit well into a capitalist system: first, they do not typically compete on price, and second, sick people cannot work and earn money to pay for expensive treatments. Also, universal healthcare won’t cost that much… the US government already pays for the old people and people on long-term disability, so adding in the rest of us healthy people won’t really add to much to the bill.

And ok, yeah, we already talked about education, but yes, it should be available to everyone, and it should be free. This is an extremely key part of the equation in that it gives those underprivileged enough to be born with nothing a way to work their way out of poverty on their own merits. Plus, free education increases self-determination. If you really want to be a doctor, you can be a doctor without having to worry about whether you can afford it or not.

But this isn’t really socialism… these are basically just band-aids on a bad system… they will help significantly, but don’t really change the game. We still have a massive inequality problem to deal with. So for an answer to this, let’s go back 60 years ago to the 50’s, America’s golden age, when things seems to work just keen and everyone was able to afford to own their own home on a single income, and all that… or at least if you were white. So what fueled this magic age? Actually, it was basically socialism. If you take a look at the tax brackets back then, the top bracket was actually 90%. What this did was effectively set a maximum wage on rich people. If they earned more than this maximum amount, it was not worth keeping, as they would have to give 90 of that extra wealth to the tax man. So what did the rich people who owned the corporations and such do when the companies got more money in, well, they had to give it to someone else, such as the workers who did the labor. Which is why the average family could afford a decent life back then. But then later on in the century, this tax rate was dropped significantly. And now the people who owned the companies figured something out. They realized that they were the ones who got to decide what to do with the money their companies earned, and that there was nothing stopping them from just giving it all to themselves. So they did. At this point, inequality begins to skyrocket, and these ceos and such began to figure out that if they got rid of their employees, or cut their benefits, or paid them less, that hey, there would be more money for their own pockets, and so they got very, very rich. And then they bought the government and manipulated it to make it harder to have labor unions and such, and now we are all in a horrible downward spiral back towards a new feudal age. As I heard someone say recently, every billionaire is policy failure.

So is the solution then to just put the top tax rate back to 90%? Well, sure, that is a good start, but it wouldn’t do anything to offset the fact that these people have already pretty much gotten all the money. At this point it might be wise to also instigate some kind of wealth tax, which means basically taking some of that money and property away from the billionaires that are sitting on it and giving it back to rest of us. There is an ancient Hebrew tradition I have heard of called the year of the jubilee… which means that back in the day, they understood the inherent inequality built into the capitalist system, and instigated a policy that every twenty years, all the wealth in society would be taken away and then redistributed back evenly amongst everyone. This would help significantly right now, but is probably tantamount to total revolution and really probably is unfortunately not feasible.

Oh and about that maximum wage. There may be other ways to do this. For example, in strict socialism, the workers are supposed to own the means of production, which essentially means that everyone who works for a company should have some kind of say in how it spends the money it earns. If this were the case, you might not really need a maximum wage, as the workers would make sure the managers weren’t running off with all the money, and then everyone could enjoy the fruits of working for a successful company. Or you could tie the maximum wage at a company to the median wage or the lowest wage even… like say basically that nobody at a company can earn more than 20 times the amount of the average person who works there. And hey, maybe we could bring back labor unions while we are at it—these are another wonderful check on management being able to abuse their workers.

So now rents… and bureaucracy. Well, we have freed up a lot of money now with our wealth tax and our higher tax brackets, so let’s give it back to the people. Let’s say, for starters, that it should be evenly distributed amongst everyone in society. If done right, this could be enough to cover a person’s basic rent and food, so they could then choose to follow whatever pursuit they want to with their life. If they want to just sit around and watch tv all day, they can do that unmolested, and if they want more out of life, they can get a part time job or go to school or start a company or something and earn some extra money. Despite the fears of the conservative folk, I suspect that most people, if they actually got to decide, would not choose to do nothing with their life, so society would not actually collapse in a massive pile of laziness. On the contrary, innovation would boom, because self-determination would skyrocket. Oh yeah, and now that everyone can afford food and a place to live, crime would plummet, because there would be little need to steal things to get by, so we could start closing down prisons and scaling back police and such and save a ton of money, which we could then give back to the community. Oh, and also all those dehumanizing social programs everyone hates, like welfare and disability and all that, we could just close all those down, stop scrutinizing people, and replace these programs with this one simple system of just putting money in everyone’s account each month. And if the socialism aspect of this bothers you, just think of it as every citizen being a shareholder in America and getting their share of the dividends. Yay, capitalism! Oh, and we would save a lot of money when we get rid of all this bureaucracy too… maybe we could use it to fund education or something. Hmm, not a bad plan—let’s call this system a universal basic income (because that’s what generally it is called).

Ok, sure, there are still a few kinks to work out here… like how does this system work for migrant workers or immigrants, or how do we ensure we can collect enough money to cover everyone, or how do we prevent the landlords from just raising all the rents, or what happens if people have a ton of kids and want to suck too much money out of the system. But those things can be worked out in good time. I think we have done enough to solve inequality for the moment, and can move onto the far more difficult problem—environmental destruction.

So while inequality may be making us all crazy and stressed out and unhappy, it’s the environment that is eventually going to kill us. As of this week (it’s now towards the end of July), according to the people who measure these things, humans have officially used up all the goods that the Earth will produce this year, meaning that everything else we consume the rest of the year must be acquired by cutting down new areas of wilderness and cutting back to even smaller numbers the species we rely upon for survival—kind of like dipping into your savings account to cover your monthly expenses. And since we are just a little over halfway into the year, that means that we would need roughly two Earths to sustain us at our current levels… and of course we only have one. This means that at this rate, we are going to eat through all the remaining reserves in a few decades or so, and eventually hit a wall, where we run out of resources, which will mean that most of us will probably die, and certainly our entire global economy will collapse into mass chaos and poverty. But hey, that’s a few years away, we don’t have to worry about that now, right? Well, that’s like saying you can just drive your car top speed towards a cliff and expect that right when you get to the cliff, you can just brake. It doesn’t work like that. Now the people who study these things seem to be in some disagreement as to whether even if we slammed on the brakes right now we’d still go over the cliff, or if just maybe we have a year or two left to take action, but the more we waste time debating this point, the less likely it is that any of us will survive. Oh, and don’t forget that the world population is still increasing rapidly, and the wilderness areas are rapidly getting smaller, so it’s not just that we are driving straight towards a cliff, we are actually going downhill and stepping on the accelerator.

So if we are all going to die fairly soon, why have we not stepped on the brakes already? Good question. And probably a somewhat complicated answer, but my gut feeling is that it is because nobody has figured out how to make a huge pile of money out of doing that yet. And that is because this is not a problem that capitalism can fix. Yet somehow we have managed to convince ourselves that all our problems should be able to be solved by just stepping on the accelerator harder. This time, that’s not going to work.
So what does stepping on the brakes look like? Well again, this would require significant changes in government and the economic system. We tried the whole “we can save the planet if individual people just buy more responsible goods and recycle their household garbage” thing, and it didn’t work. Partly because most of the waste comes from industry, and partly because the half of the world that lives in poverty can’t afford to buy more expensive things just for the sake of principle. So policy needs to change.

First off, we need to assign a value to natural resources, and charge those who extract them some kind of tax; this would prevent the system as viewing these resources as free. How this tax is set is another difficult question, but probably doesn’t need to be solved here. You could try to measure the amount of pollution and destruction caused by removing the resources and figure out what it would cost to replant equivalent resources somewhere else—this is essentially what is referred to when people talk about a “carbon tax”—and this is a good measure, but it may not really be good enough anymore. Because when you destroy an acre of rainforest, you aren’t just destroying trees, you are killing all the animals and other living things that live there, and these don’t just magically show up somewhere else when you plant a few trees. Also, trees take a couple decades to mature, which means they may not be very helpful in ten years or so when we get to the edge of that cliff. A different approach might be to set the tax just above what the cost would be to recycle those same resources from existing waste and used goods. That would mean that there is no real business incentive to cut down resources anymore. This would mean that prices would go up of course, but hopefully that will be dealt with by the fixes to inequality we made above.

There is also a novel idea that the government (or some other entity) could simply buy up large areas of wilderness and make them off limits to development (and hunting and gathering too, hopefully), thereby forever protecting them and the wild creatures that live in them. This is probably the simplest solution, and probably the best one for wildlife and all non-human species, but when we get to that cliff and these reserves are still sitting there untouched, I’m willing to bet they would get thrown onto the fire pretty fast, so this can’t be our only solution.

But now there’s another issue. Much of the resources that are being destroyed these days are in far off places, Brazil or Russia, or Indonesia, to name a few. If America protected its wilderness, it wouldn’t solve too much as people would just keep buying products made in other countries and the world around us would get eaten up. So in lieu of magically having some kind of single global socialist government spring up overnight, I can think of only one solution (other than perhaps the buyback idea above if we could somehow afford it), but one which has become very unpopular of late—tariffs. This would mean if you wanted to import a product from another country, you have to pay the tax to cover the cost of the resources used in making it. Again this raises prices, but it has a couple of nice side effects—first, the money funds your government, which means that it serves to lower everyone’s income tax burden, and secondly, it revives more local industry, which of course provides “jobs”. And while we are at it, we may want to add to those tariffs the costs of things like worker safety measures and fair working hours and all that other stuff that we are willing to sacrifice in other people’s lives in order to buy our crap as cheaply as possible.

Ok, so now we come to the hardest pill to swallow, the one thing that nobody ever seems to be able to bring themselves to talk about, but without which, pretty much everything else we do is just a delaying tactic—controlling the population. The Earth has something in the neighborhood of 7 billion people right now and that number is growing faster than ever. Sure maybe you know a few yuppies in Seattle that aren’t having kids on principle, but the world’s population mostly lives in other places, and those places are breeding rapidly. So now if you think about it logically, the population level is really the root cause of all our other problems. The amount of resources we consume and the amount of pollution we cause and the amount of space we take up for our cars and our cities is based very much on the size of the population. If the population was small enough, we could be as wasteful as we wanted, and the Earth would grow back as fast as we could eat it up—we would not have to adjust our rules to worry about this, but we do now. Also, it is worth noting that the more people there are, the more crowded the world gets, and the more globalized we become, the more other people become competition to us, and the more we see other people as problems and not as friends—stresses that lead to increased levels of xenophobia and racial hate and all sorts of other nasty things.

So what’s the solution to the population problem? Honestly, I don’t really know, as this really is an issue that we seem to avoid discussing as a society. There is a lot of fear that this will lead to eugenics and racism and so on, but I don’t think it has to. For example, we could make some kind of rule that says that each person (regardless of race or class or whatever) could only have one child (which works out to two per couple), so that the population would stabilize and then slowly sink over time. So maybe any time someone gives birth to their second child (or their partner does), the would be required to get a vasectomy or have their tubes tied or something. This would be expensive and unpopular certainly (and unlikely that we would have enough qualified doctors to do this anyway), but the alternative is that we all die in the near future, so it may be worth a shot. However, the larger issue is again that the bulk of the population again lives in poverty in far off places where we have little control over them and how fast they are breeding. Unfortunately, this would require putting a standstill to immigration (which probably would not fly with the left), as it would seriously inflame America’s white nationalism problem on the right if we made some huge sacrifice to give up our kids but just let a bunch of foreign people migrate in and take up all the extra space anyway. So I do not think this approach is politically possible. The only feasible solution might be some kind of major education and health effort globally, trying to educate people and get them to use birth control, or maybe paying them to get vasectomies and the like. I don’t really know what this would take, but we don’t have a lot of time left, so we need to start talking about it now. But of course, all of this is going to take quite a long time to get off of the ground, so maybe we should look at a few short term solutions.

So if we can’t exactly stop the population explosion overnight, we are going to need to figure out some ways to reduce the amount of resources that we are currently using up. Since this is very much a broad strokes kind of essay, let’s just look at the top two most important resources: food and energy. Food is really our most pressing resource problem, because as soon as we fail to produce and distribute enough food to feed to world’s population, people will start dying immediately. And this goes even more so for fresh water, which is currently being disrupted greatly by climate change. With water, efforts to reduce waste and usage is already underway, but with food, there are a few very obvious solutions that perhaps may not be that well known. First off, we need to reduce the amount of food we waste. In America, something like 40% of all food produced goes straight into the garbage. First off, food producers generally toss any imperfect produce (even if it’s just ugly and perfectly edible), and secondly, stores buy way more food then they need in order to make the shelves look fuller and therefore better to shoppers. This extra food just sits on the shelf until it starts getting old, and then the store simply throws it in the garbage and buys more. So a couple easy answers here… simply require that both farms and stores use or donate instead of throw out any food they can’t sell. This food could then go to feed the poor, the homeless and the hungry, or be used for animal food or be shipped to far off places where the people are starving. It might even be a good idea to charge stores a fine for any spoiled food that gets donated so that over time, stores simply stop ordering more than they need, lowering food prices and significantly increasing the amount of people we can feed on this planet.

Oh, and that other obvious solution? Eating more vegetables and less meat. Raising an animal for meat requires significantly more food and water to feed the animal over its lifetime than it produces in meat. So removing subsidies on meat, and perhaps even taxing it as a luxury product, or gasp… banning factory meat farms would significantly reduce the food burden of the population, as people in general would be eating less meat. Now unlike some people, I’m not in favor of eliminating the practice of farming animals altogether, but people do not need meat at every meal, and reducing everyone’s usage significantly would actually improve both the health of the planet and the health of its people.

So now we have energy, much of which is used for fuel. Renewables, such as wind and solar and hydro power are good places to start, but it is important to also reduce our usage of energy, and this is most easily done by building better, bigger, and more usable public transit. Oh, and to help encourage everyone to take this transit, we should begin to ban cars from urban centers. Not only would this get more people riding the train or the monorail or the railtube or whatever, it would make our city centers significantly safer, more walkable, more able to house more people, and more pleasant places to be in general, with less noise, less pollution, and much better air quality. And once it is finally safe to walk outside again, it would significantly improve the ability of people to create communities and bond with others in their neighborhoods, especially once we have defeated poverty and therefore most crime with our excellent social policies. This planet may finally begin to look like a nice place to live again.

Ok, so back to reality, all of this will be hard enough to do if we actually were in perfect control of our government, but it sounds damn near impossible now, when our governments are corrupted by money and mostly serve the interests of a handful of rich people that own most everything and like owning everything, and want it to stay that way and are willing to do whatever it takes to stay in control. And of course, in a capitalist system, even the media is a for profit enterprise that exists to serve its filthy rich owners, so it is no surprise that any sort of real solutions to our world’s problems are buried beneath a wave of sensationalist nonsense and drivel.

A simple truth occurred to me long ago when I pondered why rich people never seem to be happy being rich, but always seem to be desperate to gain even more wealth when they already have enough to live comfortably the rest of their lives—and this is that it is not enough for them to be rich, they also want the rest of us to be poor. Poor people are desperate, poor people cannot start competitive businesses, poor people do not ask a lot of questions, they just do whatever they have to in order to squeeze together just enough to survive. In this way we are beginning to see that capitalism is quickly moving towards a new modern feudal system, where a small class of nobles (aka, rich people) own all the land and all the money, and allow everyone else to exist as a form of slave class, living on their land as long as they do what the rich people tell them to do, no matter how degrading or laborious that might be. And of course, this all is able to work because of two factors, first because the slaves are uneducated and don’t know any better, and second, because there exists a third class of soldiers (let’s call them the police) who protect the rich people from the peasants. In return, these mercenaries get to live a little bit better than slaves, and they also get the pleasure of abusing the peasants whenever they feel like it.

Ok, so now what can we do about this? First off, I guess you could vote and make sure your voice is heard, but this assumes that you can vote, and that your vote is counted and that it is counted accurately. If you live in the US, that is a really big assumption, as almost assuredly the vote totals there are manipulated and most minority groups are prevented from voting through a number of dirty tricks. So you could go out in the streets and march and protest, but that has become surprisingly ineffective of late, as at best, you are ignored by the media, and worse, protests are often used as an excuse for the ever-growing police army to go out and get a kick out of ruining some people’s lives. So before you protest, it might be a good idea to try to take over your local governments and begin defunding these armies of abusers and prison guards that you are being forced to pay for. Not necessarily to get rid of them altogether, but to reduce them to a size in which they are forced to prioritize only the most serious of crimes and are no longer large enough a force to protect corrupt officials and moguls from an angry mob. But still all of this is kind of slow and messy and dangerous.

So, what does that leave us? Is there an easy and safer way out of this mess? Well, yes, there may be. And it is a well known tactic used effectively by labor unions for a long, long time… going on strike. So all of us in the working class are basically doing all the work and producing all the resources in society, and if we simply stopped working en masse, all the rich people and the powerful corporations and the crooked governments could not do anything to stop it, as they would not be able to survive without their massive army of slaves bringing them all the resource that they consume daily to fuel their lifestyles.

We don’t exactly need individual unions anymore when all of us are basically in the same boat, facing the same problems. Strike, and voice specific demands… mostly that the crooks who are running the world into the ground step down and let a new form of democracy take over. Sure, this runs the risk of failure, leaving society in a shambles and hastening our collapse, but it’s either this or slave along for another decade and a half just to see it all go down in flames anyway. At least we can say we gave it a fighting chance.

It’s time to start applying the brakes.