This Wasn’t a Bug. It Was a Feature.

How austerity, privatization, and decay weren’t policy mistakes—but strategic design choices

The numbers are good. That’s what they say.
The economy is growing.
Unemployment’s low.
Inflation’s coming down.
Wall Street smiles like everything’s fine.

But nobody feels fine.

They’re working more. Commuting farther. Paying more for worse.
Rent is up. Groceries are up. Childcare costs more than a mortgage.
There’s no room to breathe.

They skip the doctor. Delay the car repair.
Put off the dentist for the third year running.
They wake up tired and go to bed worried. They count pills. They count hours. They count down.

There’s no margin anymore. Not for error. Not for joy.

And all the while the news says:
Booming economy. Low jobless claims. Consumer sentiment stable.

They wonder if it’s just them.
If maybe they did something wrong.

They didn’t.

This isn’t a downturn. It’s the shape of the system now.
Austerity didn’t fail. It succeeded.
Privatization didn’t underdeliver. It delivered—to the people it was meant to.

It wasn’t drift.
It wasn’t mismanagement.
It wasn’t politics.

It was policy.
Drawn up. Voted on. Signed.

The factories left. The pensions vanished. The schools crumbled. The water turned yellow. And when people asked what happened, they were told to work harder.

What if the rot wasn’t a glitch but the intended product? What if austerity wasn’t about belt-tightening, but wealth transfer? What if privatization wasn’t about efficiency, but enclosure? What if the hollowing out of public systems wasn’t mismanagement—but execution of a strategy?

Because that’s what it was.
Not chaos. Not drift. Not failure.
Design.

The World Wasn’t Originally Designed to Keep You Miserable—But That’s How It Turned Out

No one sat in a smoky room and said, “Let’s make life harder for everyone.”

That’s not how systems break people.

What happened was quieter. Slower. More banal.
Policies were written. Budgets were cut. Markets were “freed.”
And over time, one small choice after another—always in favor of capital, always against the commons—produced a machine.

Not a machine built to punish.
A machine built to extract.

But extraction has consequences.

People were told they were free.
Free to choose, free to compete, free to rise.

But in practice, freedom was the complete opposite of what was being designed. The “free market,” unrestrained, delivered anything but freedom.

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School saw it coming.
They warned that, left unchecked, capitalism would consume not just labor and land, but meaning, time, and imagination.
They weren’t right about everything.
But once the free market, deregulation-loving, neo-capitalism evangelists took hold of markets, governments, and world economies—once the state stepped back and the market stepped in—their critique began to read like prophecy.

A world ruled by extraction.
Administered life.
Freedom is redefined as survival.

No, capitalism wasn’t meant to keep you miserable.
But it wasn’t meant to keep you whole either.

How the World Was Later Designed to Keep You Miserable

This is the part most people never see.

They understand that life is hard. They know something feels off. But they think it’s random. Structural, maybe—but not intentional. Not planned.

That’s the mistake.

Because the systems that govern daily life—work, debt, housing, health care, transit, education—have all been deliberately engineered to generate just enough misery to keep you compliant, but not enough to spark mass revolt. You are meant to be exhausted, distracted, and isolated. That’s the point.

1. Work was designed to Consume You

We were told that work would give us purpose. And for a while, that was true.

When the economy had rules—when there were guardrails, when labor was protected, when the gains of productivity were shared—work wasn’t just dignified. It was rewarding. People worked, and they built things. Families, homes, futures. Purpose came not just from the job, but from what the job made possible.

That wasn’t a lie.

But that fact becomes a lie when work turns into something else entirely—when it gives you schedules you can’t control, wages that can’t keep up, and performance metrics that never quite let you rest.

And when you burn out?
That’s not a bug. That’s output.

Exhausted workers don’t organize.
Overleveraged workers don’t strike.
Atomized workers don’t resist.

When those who produce receive so little, and those who “own” receive so much, then the system isn’t broken—it’s inverted. Working doesn’t provide a return. The workers are the return. Labor becomes the yield.

That’s why the old promises no longer land. “Hard work pays off” sounds hollow, because more and more people have tried—and it didn’t. Not because they failed, but because the ladder was gone. The game was rigged.

Each successive generation has grown more skeptical. And now, many in the youngest generation have given up on the entire premise. Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re lucid. They’ve finally concluded that they’re not participants in the system—they’re the product. And they’re opting out of the game entirely.

Their great-grandfather might have worked, saved, and bought a house. He might have owned a car, raised a family on one income, taken vacations, and retired with a pension. If someone got sick, it didn’t bankrupt the household. All of this was possible in 1957, on 37 hours a week and a modest income.

To replicate that lifestyle today—to own a home, support a family, have reliable healthcare, and retire with dignity—someone would need to generate approximately $4.5 million over their working life just to maintain purchasing power parity¹. And even then, it assumes luck, stability, and no catastrophic events.

This is why Grant Cardone—viewed by many as a huckster or contrepreneur—wasn’t entirely wrong when he said: “Being a millionaire today is middle class.” Once you run the numbers, he’s essentially correct.

And the vast majority of young people entering the workforce today—crushed by student debt, locked out of homeownership, and navigating a system where stability is a luxury—will never come close.

Work, as it now stands, is no longer a path to prosperity.
It’s a system of consumption.
And what it consumes is you.

2. Debt is Designed to Trap You

Debt is no longer just a financial tool. It’s a system of control.

Student loans. Credit cards. Medical bills. Mortgages. Buy-now-pay-later. Zero-interest-for-six-months. Debt has become the substrate of modern life—the thing beneath everything else, quietly shaping your decisions.

People are paying for groceries in installments.

But here’s the part people miss:
Debt isn’t just about money.
It’s about behavior.

Debt keeps people compliant.
It makes you think twice before quitting a job, starting a business, blowing the whistle, or taking a risk.
It conditions you to avoid disruption—because disruption is dangerous when you're leveraged.

If you default, you're ruined.
If you comply, you're stuck.
There is no win—just different forms of delay.

And this is by design.

Before the 1980s, credit in America was largely about access to capital for productive use—to buy a home, build a business, maybe purchase a durable good. You needed to prove your income, your character, your long-term viability.

But then the model shifted.²

Post-Reagan, post-deregulation, credit was no longer about trust—it was about yield. Creditworthiness became less about what you had and more about what a bank could extract. Suddenly, entire business models were built not on repayment, but on delinquency. On minimum payments. On compound interest. On late fees. On churn.

Credit became a product.
Risk was securitized.
Debt was turned into an asset class—just not yours.

And while credit got easier to obtain, it got harder to survive.
People could borrow more—but they owed more.
And the cost of default became existential.

Your credit score became a social sorting mechanism.
It decided your car insurance rate, your job application, your apartment lease.
It was no longer about whether you could be trusted.
It became a proxy for whether you could be disciplined.

This is the core shift:
We moved from a society that offered public goods to one that rents everything back through private debt.

Healthcare? On a credit card.
Education? Paid over 30 years.
Transportation? Financed at 7.9% APR.
Even groceries are now payable in four installments, interest-free—for now.

Debt used to be a bridge. Now it’s a cage.
And the door locks silently.

3. Public Systems are Designed to Fail

Because when public services break, someone always finds a way to profit.

Most government workers aren’t villains. They’re overworked, underpaid, and stuck inside broken systems. They’re trying to keep things running with fewer people, smaller budgets, and more rules than ever. Over time, they stop fighting for better—they just try to survive.

But at the top—among politicians, consultants, and private contractors—there’s a different story.

When a public school fails, it’s used to justify a charter takeover.
When the DMV is a nightmare, someone proposes a privatized solution—for triple the cost.
When Medicaid takes too long, a health tech startup sells the “fix.”
When a city agency can’t do its job, a management firm gets hired at ten times the budget to do it worse.

The game is simple:

• Let the system starve

• Blame it for being slow or broken

• Hand it off to the private sector

• Turn public money into private profit

You don’t need a conspiracy.
You just need a business model.

When public systems fail, people lose faith in them.
And once that happens, it gets easier to sell off the pieces.

This is how we ended up with a government that still collects your taxes, but doesn’t fix your road. A government that enforces contracts but doesn’t protect families. That audits the poor but not the powerful.

We were told the state would become more efficient.
Instead, it just became easier to ignore.

Because once people believe that nothing public ever works,
they stop asking for it to work at all.

4. The Middle Class Was Designed to Disappear

The postwar middle class didn’t appear by accident.
It was the result of capitalism under control—capitalism with rules, guardrails, and limits.

Strong unions. High taxes on the rich. Affordable housing. Public investment.
A balance between labor and capital that gave ordinary people not just wages, but dignity, stability, and the belief in a future.

It was the system working because it was being managed.
Regulated. Contained. Tamed.

And yes, it was also political.
The U.S. needed to show the world that capitalism could provide for the many—not just the few.
That liberal democracy could beat back both fascism and communism—not just militarily, but materially.
It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a consensus.
And for a while, it held.

But it didn’t last.

Once the geopolitical threats faded—once labor was weakened and global finance unleashed—the consensus collapsed.
The rules were ripped up. The protections dismantled. The gains reversed.

And the middle class wasn’t expanded.
It was liquidated.

What replaced it was never meant to deliver security. It was meant to deliver consumption:

• A consumer class, dependent on debt and dopamine.

• A working class, precarious and replaceable.

• A professional class, just comfortable enough to fear falling.

This isn’t decay. It’s direction.
Not decline, but design.

The goal wasn’t just to redistribute wealth—it was to eliminate the expectation of security altogether.
Because insecure people are easier to manage.
They don’t organize. They internalize.

And when they look around and see no one else climbing,
they stop believing in ladders.

And so, here we are

This is the world as it exists—not broken, not failing, but operating exactly as intended.

People are not supposed to thrive.
They’re supposed to function.

And once you see that, the question changes from “Why is everything falling apart?” to: “Who does this serve?”

That’s where the idea of “belt tightening,” and “living within our means,” and all of the other things we hear that are necessary to solve all of the ills I’ve described come into play.

Because they serve the true masters of this system. Capital holders.

Austerity as Extraction

Austerity has always been sold as a moral correction.
“We have to live within our means,” say the same people who passed trillion-dollar tax cuts. “We can’t afford waste,” say the consultants billing six figures to privatize city hall.

But austerity doesn’t reduce costs.
It redistributes burdens.

It shifts risk from the state to the individual.
It converts collective failure into private opportunity.
It shrinks the promise of government down to a single word: no.

And every time it does, someone else gets paid.

• When school budgets shrink → parents pay for tutors

• When public transit withers → car sales, toll roads, and gas profits rise

• When health coverage erodes → insurers and pharma consolidate and cash in

This isn’t fiscal prudence.
It’s a funnel. A siphon. A quiet machine that moves resources up the chain.

And the cruelty? That’s not collateral damage.
That’s the mechanism.

Because austerity doesn’t just remove services.
It removes expectations.
It teaches people that the collective is dead—that nothing public works, and nothing public is worth defending.

Once that lesson lands, the fight is over.
People stop organizing. Stop voting. Stop asking.
They turn inward. They try to survive.

And that’s the true function of austerity—not to fix the budget, but to discipline the public. To make everyone a little more desperate, a little more tired, and a lot more alone.

And along with the “free market” solution of austerity comes its little cousin, privatization.

Privatization: The Long Enclosure

The 20th century built public goods.
The 21st century sold them off.

Highways, utilities, railroads, airports, schools, water systems—sliced, sold, and securitized.
It was called modernization. Innovation. Reform.

But what privatization really did was convert shared infrastructure into private revenue streams.
It didn’t make things more efficient. It made them profitable—for someone else.

• Charter schools extract public funding for private management, often with lower oversight and worse outcomes.

• Municipal water systems get sold to equity firms that raise rates while cutting maintenance.

• Toll roads become perpetual cash machines, with contracts written to forbid upgrades or competition.

What’s left behind isn’t a better system.
It’s a gutted one.

Privatization wasn’t about fixing the public sector.
It was about fencing it off.

This was enclosure—not of fields, but of futures.
The same logic that once pushed peasants off the commons now pushes families out of affordable housing and students out of public education.
Only now, it’s done through legal contracts, vendor agreements, and opaque investment vehicles.

The language changed. The tactics didn’t.

And just like the original enclosures, this wasn’t about creating value.
It was about limiting access. About turning public rights into private subscriptions.

Once the public realm is gone, you don’t get it back.
You rent it.
By the month.
With a 20% markup.

And the final nail in the coffin? The collapse of the public entity itself.

The Strategic Denuding of State Capacity

Critics call it “government failure.”
But what if the failure is the feature?

Reagan mocked government.
Conservatives fought against it.
Trump gutted it.

Meanwhile, the state continues to shrink—not in size, but in strength. Not in visibility, but in capacity.

It still enforces laws, collects taxes, and maintains appearances.
But ask it to act boldly in the public interest—and it stalls. Delays. Defers.

That’s not accidental. That’s the point.

The real goal was never to eliminate government.
It was to hollow it out so that it could no longer stand in the way.

Because a strong state can tax the rich.
It can prosecute monopolies.
It can nationalize failing systems and redirect capital toward collective survival.

A weak state, on the other hand, can’t do any of that.
It can barely issue a passport on time.

And that’s exactly what the architects of this system wanted:

• Enough government to protect contracts.

• Enough to stabilize markets.

• Enough to suppress unrest.

But not enough to challenge the structure itself.

They don’t want a fully funded IRS.
They want an IRS that audits the poor and lets billionaires walk.
They don’t want a DOJ that enforces justice.
They want one that prosecutes retail theft but not corporate fraud.
They don’t want an EPA with teeth.
They want a regulatory façade that signs off on extraction while pretending to regulate it.

The illusion of governance remains.
But the muscle is gone.

This is what happens when the state becomes a stage set.
All symbol. No force.

Not failed government.
Strategically disabled government.

Because when the public has nowhere to turn,
when the state can’t protect them,
they stop demanding protection.

And that silence is worth everything.

Welcome to the Endgame

This is where it leads:

• A world of decaying infrastructure with no public will—or political capacity—to fix it

• Citizens buried in private debt, paying out of pocket for what used to be public

• A population trained to blame the symptoms—crime, poverty, burnout, apathy—but never the design

We weren’t led here by accident.
We were walked here, step by step, through policies, choices, deferrals, and distractions.
Every collapse was called reform.
Every extraction was framed as efficiency.
Every system failure was sold as a reason to try the market again.

This isn’t drift.
It’s direction.

The world around us—crumbling, costly, and cruel—is not the result of poor planning.
It’s the result of planning for someone else’s benefit.

And as long as we keep fighting the outcomes, we’ll never confront the architecture.
As long as we keep treating this as a bug in the system, we’ll keep chasing ghosts.

Because the truth is plain:

This wasn’t a bug.
This was the system working exactly as designed.

1. Rough estimate based on cumulative income required to replicate postwar middle-class purchasing power, asset access, and retirement stability. Includes inflation adjustments (CPI), home price appreciation (Case-Shiller), healthcare cost inflation, college tuition growth, and pension erosion. A median-priced home in 1957 cost ~$12,000 (approx. $130,000 in today’s dollars), while the average U.S. home now exceeds $400,000. Meanwhile, defined-benefit pensions have collapsed, health costs have skyrocketed, and wages have stagnated. To match the security and lifestyle of a 1950s middle-class household—on a single income—a worker today would need to earn, save, and invest the modern equivalent of $4–5 million in net income across their career.

2. The modern debt trap wasn’t built overnight. It emerged through a series of legal, economic, and policy shifts—mostly invisible to the public—beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating throughout the 1980s and 1990s:

1978 – Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha
The Supreme Court rules that national banks can charge interest rates based on the laws of the state in which they’re headquartered—not where the borrower lives. This effectively guts state-level usury laws. It’s the birth of interstate credit deregulation and the rise of high-interest lending.

1980 – Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA)
Signed by Jimmy Carter, it deregulates interest rate caps and expands the reach of federally chartered financial institutions. Effectively ends legal limits on what lenders can charge.

1986–1994 – Rise of the FICO Score as Standard
FICO becomes the default metric for consumer “worthiness.” Originally intended as a risk tool, it becomes a social gatekeeper: used by landlords, insurers, employers, even dating apps. Your behavior is turned into a score, and the score shapes your access to life.

1999 – Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (Financial Services Modernization Act)
Repeals key provisions of Glass-Steagall, allowing commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies to consolidate. Opens the door to massive securitization of consumer debt—including subprime mortgages and student loans.

2000s–Present – Expansion of Consumer Debt as Default Financing Model

• Higher education shifts from public funding to student loans as primary revenue stream

• Healthcare costs skyrocket, with medical debt becoming the #1 cause of bankruptcy

• Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), payday loans, and high-interest fintech proliferate

• Default risk becomes profitable through fees, penalties, and secondary market instruments

Outcome:
The U.S. economy shifts from a model of productive credit (helping people build) to extractive credit (locking people in). Households go from being borrowers to being revenue streams—carefully managed, segmented, and endlessly refinanced.