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 by 1000%. Food, 300%. Rent and house prices, 400%. Childcare, 500%. Those are all conservative estimate, too, from what I reckon. You can add to that list as you see fit.

Now, that’s over a few decades. But that’s hyperinflation, too — only of a creeping kind, which is all the more dangerous, because it gets normalized. The hyperinflation Americans face isn’t for consumer goods — like it is in Venezuela. Shampoos, deodorants, socks. It is for something more fundamental still — the basic goods that people need to live decent lives. All the basics of life have skyrocketed in price in a kind of epic way that the world has never really seen before, outside of hyperinflationary episodes, like the Weimar Republic.

Do you see what I mean by eudaimonic hyperinflation? Even people in Pakistan, Chile, and Kenya don’t face such a thing. If you need healthcare there, it hasn’t risen in price by two thousand percent. So America, weirdly, funnily, tragically, like Venezuela, is going through it’s own hyperinflationary collapse. One which it doesn’t see, let alone understand yet — and one not brought by socialism, but, it seems, a lack of it. How ironic. How strange. How can that be? We’ll get there. Let’s continue with the economics.

Hence, life in America has become a grim exercise in living at the razor’s edge of ruin. A full 80% of Americans — even nominally affluent people — live paycheck to paycheck. A whole nation, more or less, is one emergency, illness, or unforeseen expenditure away from ruin. And ruin in this case means genuine ruin: bankruptcy, homelessness, going with healthcare, and so forth. Americans are broke, my friends. That is what a nation living paycheck to paycheck means.

Why are Americans broke? Why has America become something like the world’s first poor rich country? Median incomes in Europe aren’t higher than in the States, really — but Americans don’t seem able to make ends meet, and Europeans do, at least more so.

It’s not because Americans are wastrels, fools, gamblers, or even the much derided consumerists they’re sometimes made out to be. They aren’t spending their money on even more Paul Manafort style Ostrich leather jackets, summer homes, and yachts — instead of socking it away wisely. Nor are Americans broke because the price of technological advancements, like TVs and computers, has risen — in fact, it’s fallen, by multiples. So Americans aren’t broke because they’re choosing to be.

Americans are broke because they have to be. The reason a nation is living paycheck to paycheck, at the grim edge of ruin, is because the price of the basics of life has skyrocketed — catastrophically, epically, ruinously, in a way nowhere else the world has seen. America is going through a nightmarish episode of eudaimonic hyperinflation. The price of the basics of a decent life have gone through a kind of massive, creeping, relentless inflation, to the point that each and every one of them has gone up by at least hundreds, if not thousands of percent.

Yet at the same time, average incomes have been flatlined. They haven’t risen much, if at all. And that means that Americans have had to try to afford hyperinflationary basics on incomes that haven’t risen. The results? Crippling debt. Kids that can’t afford to move out. A whole class of elderly people who are going bankrupt.

What caused eudaimonic hyperinflation in America? Capitalism did. Not mom-and-pop capitalism, the kind that keeps my neighbourhood buzzing with bars, cafes, restaurants, and shops. Predatory capitalism. In industry after industry, consolidation has been the norm. Huge monopolies have been built. Those monopolies have raised prices relentlessly every year, because that is what monopolies do — because capitalism demands rising profits, no matter what the cost to human beings is.

Take HMOs as a simple example. There are just a handful now, and they’re gobbling up whole hospitals at this point — yet most of them barely provide “healthcare” of a standard that would be acceptable in any other rich country. That’s how having a kid end up costing $30K — fictitious charges, like “holding your baby, that’ll be $1000”, quite literally invented, by predatory monopolies, to jack up profits. Americans ended up getting squeezed for every last penny — for the simplest of human acts, like holding their own newborns. Until, finally, quite naturally, they went broke.

Now. What’s hidden in all that? Americans are already paying for the things socialism should have long ago provided. Healthcare, education, transportation, media, retirement, pensions, safety nets. Only they’re paying through the nose — ruinously, to the point of living paycheck to paycheck. The money doesn’t need to be found. Nor will socialism won’t raise the price — it can’t.

How are Americans overpaying? Obviously, there’s the direct cost — they’re broke! But then there are the indirect costs, too — the “opportunity costs”, as Americans say. Americans live five years less than Europeans. The suicide rate is skyrocketing. They don’t trust their institutions or their society. Their kids can’t afford to move out. Mistrust, despair, loneliness, rage, futility, depression — right up to life itself. These are costs, too, that American pay predatory capitalism. They are massively overpaying capitalism for the basics of life, not just with money, but with their potential — their time, energy, minds, bodies, and lives.

“Socialism” — minor-league social democracy — just as in every other rich country, will lower the prices of the basics of life massively, systemically, and permanently. It reduces the price of all the basics of life, which American faces severe eudaimonic hyperinflation for now, because capitalism keeps jacking it up. How so? All these markets tend naturally towards monopoly — it’s more efficient to have just one giant HMO than a thousand small ones. Only a social monopoly, instead of a capitalist one, uses it monopsony power to lower prices for people, instead of constantly raise them. Drugs, textbooks, classes, tuitions, and so on, drop in price. So much so that, for example, Denmark pays students to go to college.

(And the quality goes up, too — because where capitalists have an incentive to cut corners, systems with social incentives, where no one’s being rewarded for how many bills they generate, or how much of a profit they turn this nanosecond, have suddenly have an incentive to keep really put care, attention, decency, and humanity into their work.)

Hence, people in the rest of the rich world haven’t faced eudaimonic hyperinflation like America because they didn’t make the fatal choice of trying to make capitalism provide the basics of life. Instead, socially administered public goods, like healthcare, education, transport, finance, media, kept the price of just living a decent life down — and the quality far superior to America.

It’s true that Americans’ “tax bills” will go up by 5 or 10 percent if it chooses some kind of social democracy. But it’s truer to say that the costs are not even half the equation. That 5 or 10 percent increase in taxes will begin to undo the thousand percent hyperinflationary increases in the basics of life. Hmm, five percent for a thousand? Does that sound like a good deal to you? It should — there’s rarely been a better one in history. Americans will have more income, not less. Yet it’s a challenging thing to explain to people in politicans’ soundbites, and so in a very real sense, I feel America’s future depends on Americans really explaining to one another and understanding it.

America really did become something like a new Weimar Republic. We don’t talk about it that way, but we should. Eudaimonic hyperinflation took a flamethrower American prosperity — to the point that Americans went broke as a nation. What does poverty do to people? A collapsed middle class looked to a fascist for salvation. And if America is to have a future, it’s going to have to undo all that — beginning at the beginning, with the soaring, devastating, life-crushing eudaimonic hyperinflation that capitalism caused.