How to Unrig a Whole-ass Economy

Next time a politician talks about affordability, ask them four questions. If they can't answer, they're not serious. Here's the measuring stick.

How to Unrig the Economy

It’s rigged. Here’s how we unrig it.

Time and again, we’ve had to come together as a nation to rebuild from the ashes of an out-of-control private sector and Wall Street. Time and again, they completely fuck everything up and we have to come in and clean up the mess. Usually they ask us for forgiveness instead of permission.

Interestingly, with Sam Altman and AI, it’s being done before they’ve even wrecked the global economy. He’s already out there advocating for the public to back them up in case things go wrong. Before things have even gone wrong. Going the permission route. Bold.

That tells you everything you need to know about how this works.

This isn’t capitalism versus socialism. It’s balance versus capture.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, we built a massive economy with robust public capacity that directly competed in the market. That worked to create balance. That worked to build a massive and powerful middle-class. The gains, of course, weren’t shared equally. In fact, inequality was written into the plan. (More on this here)

Still, a strong private sector, strong public sector, and strong labor movement keeping the other in check helped. Private companies innovated. We built the foundation of infrastructure, education, and research. Workers had leverage because they built things of value and had unions to back them up.

Then we gave it away. We offshored the factories, busted the unions, privatized the infrastructure, and handed Wall Street the keys to the economy. Now the private sector is so powerful it’s captured the state itself.

It’s time to take it back. Not through revolution, but through rebuilding the capacity we spent fifty years dismantling. Here’s what that actually looks like.

Reclaim What We Paid For

Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire by renting back to us what we built.

SpaceX has received over $20 billion in government contracts since 2008. Uses NASA facilities. Stands on sixty years of NASA research and engineers we trained. We paid to invent rockets, satellite technology, space systems. Musk monetizes it and calls himself a genius.

We need to stop giving away contracts. Restart NASA as a commercial entity that launches at cost for public benefit. Compete directly with SpaceX. Hire good union workers. Use the profits to fund the next generation of publicly owned research instead of subsidizing trillionaires.

Public competition with private monopoly creates affordability. Public launches at cost drive down prices for everyone. Lower launch costs mean cheaper satellites, cheaper internet, cheaper communications infrastructure.

The NIH funded the research that became Moderna’s mRNA vaccine platform. They patented it, privatized it, made billions. We paid twice; once for the research, once for the vaccines.

If we paid for the machinery, we own the machinery. When we fund the science, we should own the results.

Build Where Markets Are Failing

Over 600 rural hospitals have closed or are on the edge since 2005. In cities, hospitals in low-income neighborhoods shut down while wealthy areas get new facilities. People are dying in their homes. Dying in their cars.

There’s no profit in saving people where resources are thin — whether that’s a town of 3,000 or a neighborhood written off by investors. So private companies let hospitals collapse.

Private equity made it worse. They bought hospitals, loaded them with debt to pay themselves dividends, cut staff, slashed quality, extracted cash. Healthcare companies owned by private equity have higher mortality rates — but they’re more profitable for investors. The pattern is the same everywhere: when care becomes a profit center, the people who need it most lose access first.

What’s the solution? When hospitals fail, we can buy them. States, federal government, and communities become the healthcare providers. Not subsidizing private companies to fail better, actually running hospitals ourselves.

Healthcare at cost, not for profit. No shareholders demanding 15% returns. No executives getting bonuses for denying care. When monopoly is the most efficient model like in utilities and healthcare, it should be a people’s monopoly, not a private one.

Housing works the same way. Right now there’s massive incentive to build the biggest house possible because it’s more profitable per square foot. If companies don’t want to build affordable housing for 7-8% profit, then we need to start public development corporations owned by cities, towns, counties, and states that build at 2-3% profit or break-even.

If the profit motive excludes affordability, we do it ourselves.

Make Looting Illegal Again

Stock buybacks were illegal until 1982, treated like insider trading because everyone understood they were a way for executives to loot their own companies.

Then Reagan’s SEC chair, a former Wall Street banker, rewrote the rules and legalized corporate self-dealing. From 2010 to 2020, U.S. corporations spent 93% of their profits on buybacks and dividends. Not on workers. Not on research. On stock manipulation to trigger executive bonuses.

Lowe’s spent $42 billion buying back stock while paying its median worker $32,626. They could have doubled every employee’s pay for five years straight. Instead, they inflated the share price.

One rule change turned corporations from engines of production into ATMs for the wealthy.

Re-criminalize stock buybacks. Return the financial sector to its actual utility of capital formation, not capital extraction. The financial products Wall Street creates are so complicated you need two PhDs to understand them. Complexity hides extraction. You can’t eat a derivative.

When that money goes to workers instead of stock manipulation, wages rise. Production increases. Things get more affordable because capital is directed toward making things instead of financial games.

Public Equity for Public Risk

Sam Altman says the government should be the “insurer of last resort” for AI. The same AI he says will put millions out of work.

They want us there when things collapse, but not there when profits roll in.

If we’re the insurer of last resort, we’re shareholders of first resort. Public equity in publicly de-risked ventures. Period.

This applies to AI, banking, any industry asking for bailouts. We take board seats. We get dividends. We have oversight. If our risk backs your venture, our people share in the gains.

The Measuring Stick

Any politician who talks about affordability without talking about power is selling you bullshit.

You can’t make housing affordable without changing who builds it and why. You can’t make healthcare affordable while private equity loots hospitals. You can’t make college affordable while student debt is a profit center. You can’t make anything affordable while corporations spend 93% of profits manipulating stock prices instead of paying workers.

Now you have the measuring stick. Next time a politician talks about affordability, ask them four questions:

1. Are they building public capacity to compete with private monopolies, or just regulating them?

2. Are they taking over where markets have completely failed, or subsidizing private companies to fail better?

3. Are they re-criminalizing financial extraction, or just asking nicely for better behavior?

4. Are they demanding public equity for public risk, or letting corporations socialize losses and privatize gains?

If they’re not talking about these mechanisms, they’re not serious about affordability. They’re serious about sounding serious.

This is about power. They won’t give it up. It has to be taken back through community action, through law, through ownership, through rebuilding the public capacity we had from the 1930s through the 1970s, before we decided to hand everything to people who promised they’d be better stewards than we could be ourselves.

They lied.

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Corbin Trent

This is the fifth essay in a 12-part series where I lay out how we got to where we are and the next steps required to move forward. You can find them here: first, second, third, and the fourth. The sixth essay will be published at America’s Undoing on Thursday November 20th.

On December 9th I’ll be announcing a new initiative designed to bring power to the people, not the wealthy.

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.