If You Think Socialism’s Unaffordable, You Don’t Understand Capitalism

How Hidden Hyperinflation Left Americans Broke, and What to do About It

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
7 min readAug 7, 2018

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In this essay, I’m going to challenge (wait, I mean smash) the funny, foolish, backwards myth that “socialism is too expensive!!” — which no one should believe.

See that poor guy above pushing a wheelbarrow full of money to pay for basic things? That’s what Americans have had to begin doing, now, too, only to capitalism — and maybe they don’t quite understand how or why yet. If you think socialism’s unaffordable — you don’t understand capitalism.

(So drop your ideological biases right here — if you want to learn something, that is. That myth, by the way, isn’t economics, my friends. It’s just financial engineering. The economics are very, very simple. I am going to explain them to you in a very straightforward way — but one which I think no one has taught you to really think about yet.)

There’s a principle which I don’t think anyone’s explaining to Americans — at least not well. They’re already “paying” for the very things that social democracy would provide. That money doesn’t have to be “found” or “raised.” It’s already pouring out of their pockets, like a huge river, into the coffers of predatory capitalism. There’s no need to worry about “how to pay for socialism”, because Americans are massively, gigantically overpaying capitalism, to a degree unseen in modern history, for the basics of life (and they are paying not just with money, but with time, energy, trust, meaning, purpose, belonging, health, their kids, and life itself, but we’ll get to that).

Americans face a situation of eudaimonic hyperinflation. I put in pompous italic because I want to make a point. In Venezuela, prices have risen by thousands or millions of percent, for consumer goods. And Americans — especially fringe conservatives — make fun of those dirty, foolish Venezuelans, and blame socialism for letting it happen.

Yet in America, the prices of all the basics of a good life — “eudaimonia” — have risen by hundreds or thousands of percent. Perhaps you think I exaggerate. Very, well, let’s review the evidence. Healthcare has risen by two thousand percent. The price of education has gone up

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