Innovation is a distraction. Don’t kid yourself thinking our GDP grows because smart inventors are getting rich off good ideas. No. Most money is still made the old-fashioned way — through sheer violence.

Rich people force poor people to work for them for wages. The poor do not get to negotiate these wages. Wages are what the market dictates is a fair price for one hour of their labor. Though a cashier at McDonald’s handles easily hundreds of dollars in an hour, she will be paid $7.25 an hour regardless of what her employer earns from her labor and they will insist this is fair. She may hate her job and cry every night on her mother’s pullout couch wishing she could find a better, higher-paying job, but all of this suffering is her choice, obviously.

Oh, that’s right — a lot of people think that if you’re not being coerced to work by top-heavy goons by gunpoint, you’re somehow not being coerced to work. They like to spin these weird pretzels of logic where those without money or resources are actually free to live in a world where the rich have now privatized the commons and kicked out the ladder. When confronted with the reality that single moms work because if they don’t their kids are taken away, they shrug and insist those moms shouldn’t have had kids. When confronted with the bleak dilemma that many millions of chronically ill people face staying in horrible jobs every day to keep their health insurance, they shrug and insist it’s their own fault for getting sick in a country where medical care is prohibitively expensive. So on and so forth.

Capitalist shitbag science means the rationalizations for injustice never end. No, unless you’re literally being held down by gunpoint, none of this will ever qualify as coercion. They always win because you’re always free to choose something else — apparently.

Before Capitalism, what is now the United States was just a sandbox of tribes living off little more than the fish, nuts and berries they found in the woods for thousands of years. Where I live now in Northeast Pennsylvania, the Delaware tribe lived long, healthy lives primarily eating the same kind of deer that today live to fuck up my garden.

Now Capitalism has my neighbors spending most of their days driving to a job that I know pays them less than they need to feed their kids. But surely this isn’t coercion. They are free to work. And, of course, their kids are free to starve.

For reasons that lay beyond my comprehension, we call this situation progress because whatever this shitbaggery is, it more closely approximates “pure capitalism” than what the Delaware were doing.

That the deer are more free than my neighbors taunts me.