The market keeps rising. The cost of being free keeps rising faster.
By Michael Smith — Reflective MVS
My brother keeps asking me where he should invest his money.
It sounds like a straightforward question.
Find a few solid companies. Diversify. Think long term. Avoid anybody explaining cryptocurrency from the passenger seat of a rented Lamborghini.
Simple enough.
Except I never seem to have a good answer.
Not because I oppose saving money, owning property, preparing for retirement, or leaving something behind. I believe in financial security. I believe people should be able to build something for themselves and their families.
My hesitation comes from somewhere else.
When my brother asks, “Where should I invest?” I hear another question hiding underneath it:
What part of this system should I help finance?
That is where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Because I am no longer convinced that the modern American economy primarily rewards companies for making better products, treating workers well, or improving people’s lives.
Increasingly, it rewards whoever can gain the most leverage over something people cannot live without.
Housing.
Healthcare.
Employment.
Information.
Technology.
Debt.
Time.
A company can become more valuable while its workers become less secure. A landlord can become richer while a neighborhood becomes less livable. A technology platform can call itself innovative while making its product less reliable, its users more dependent, and its executives wealthy enough to purchase a small moon.
We call this growth because “organized extraction” does not test well with investors.
The Video That Put Language Around My Discomfort
Benn Jordan’s video, The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now, helped me name something I had been circling for years.
Jordan calls the emerging system leveragism.
His argument is not simply that capitalism produces greed or inequality. Humanity managed both long before somebody invented the quarterly earnings call.
His larger point is that concentrated wealth allows powerful corporations and individuals to manipulate the conditions under which everyone else must live.
Money is no longer used only to build companies, purchase assets, or create products. It is used to influence housing supplies, labor markets, elections, information systems, infrastructure, technology, and public policy.
The goal is not always to sell us something better.
Sometimes the goal is to make refusal too expensive.
Jordan’s video is an economic manifesto, not scripture handed down from Mount YouTube. Some of its specific claims deserve separate scrutiny. “Leveragism” is his term, not an established economic school.
But his central warning landed with me: the greatest threat may not be that concentrated wealth takes all our money. It may be that concentrated wealth leaves us too vulnerable to say no.
No to an abusive employer.
No to an unaffordable rent increase.
No to an insurance company denying care.
No to a platform deciding what information we can find.
No to a government steadily expanding surveillance while shrinking the social protections that make resistance possible.
That is where my discomfort with capitalism has been heading.
I Used to Believe Capitalism Could Grow a Conscience
For years, I found John Mackey’s theory of conscious capitalism persuasive.
It offered what appeared to be a sensible middle road.
Business did not have to exist solely to maximize shareholder returns. A company could earn a profit while serving workers, customers, suppliers, communities, investors, and a larger purpose.
The Conscious Capitalism organization describes the philosophy through four principles: higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, conscious leadership, and conscious culture.
I still believe those principles are worthy.
I am simply less convinced they are strong enough to govern an economic system.
Conscious capitalism depends heavily on people with power choosing not to abuse it.
It asks executives to remain ethical when exploitation is profitable. It asks investors to accept a slower return when faster money can be made by cutting labor, raising prices, outsourcing risk, or converting another part of ordinary life into a subscription service.
That is admirable.
It is also a little like protecting the henhouse by publishing a leadership manual for foxes.
Whole Foods and the Limits of Good Intentions
Whole Foods Market may be the clearest metaphor for both the appeal and the limitation of conscious capitalism.
The company was built around the idea that a grocer could pursue a purpose larger than selling products. Its stated purpose remains “to nourish people and the planet,” supported by values concerning customers, team members, suppliers, communities, food standards, and environmental stewardship.
From the outside, those statements can look like polished corporate copy.
But anybody who has observed the culture closely understands that people built real expectations around those ideas. Words such as stakeholder, team member, community and purpose were supposed to mean that business did not have to operate as organized combat between ownership and everybody else.
Then Amazon bought Whole Foods.
In 2017, Amazon agreed to acquire the company for approximately $13.7 billion, including its debt. Amazon said Whole Foods would retain its brand, headquarters, suppliers and mission.
The lesson is not that everything good disappeared the moment the paperwork cleared.
The organic apples did not turn evil overnight. The salad bar did not begin quoting Ayn Rand. The company’s public values remain.
The deeper lesson is about ownership.
A business founded as an example of stakeholder capitalism was itself ultimately a purchasable asset.
Its culture could be sincere. Its mission could be meaningful. Its values could be printed on walls, taught in meetings, repeated in interviews and believed by thousands of people.
But somebody with a larger pile of money could still buy the entire institution.
Values and all.
Amazon did not have to defeat the philosophy of conscious capitalism in a debate.
It purchased the company most closely associated with it.
That is the structural weakness I can no longer ignore.
A company may genuinely attempt to balance the needs of employees, customers, suppliers, communities and investors. But once ownership changes, those commitments operate within whatever boundaries the new owner permits.
The new owner does not have to remove the mission statement.
It can frame it, hang it in the hallway and reserve the right to define what it means.
That is not an accusation against every decision made after an acquisition. It is a recognition of where final authority rests.
A conscious leader may protect workers.
The next leader may not.
A mission-driven company may resist extraction.
Its next owner may prefer efficiency, consolidation or a return large enough to make Wall Street analysts briefly experience human emotion.
A decent boss is not a labor law.
A thoughtful founder is not a democratic institution.
A set of corporate values is not much of a shield when someone with enough capital can purchase the whole building.
Conscious capitalism asks powerful people to remain conscious.
Economic democracy asks why the rest of us must depend on their mood.
Capitalism Has Never Been Neutral for Black America
Black Americans have particular reason to question stories about neutral markets and fair competition.
America did not merely allow slavery to exist beside its economy. Enslaved Black people were part of the nation’s capital structure.
Their bodies were property.
Their labor generated wealth they could not own.
Their children could be counted as future assets.
After emancipation came Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, land theft, employment discrimination, union exclusion, redlining, predatory lending and generations of policy designed to keep Black labor available while restricting Black ownership.
The language changed.
The extraction learned table manners.
As I have documented in The Untold Labor History of Black America, the machinery connecting race, law and labor did not vanish. It adapted. Slave codes became Black Codes. Forced labor became convict leasing. Explicit discrimination was often replaced by classifications, contracts, maps and paperwork respectable enough to survive a committee meeting.
That history makes it difficult for me to accept the market as a natural force floating above politics.
Markets are designed.
Someone decides what can be owned.
Someone defines a contract.
Someone determines whether workers may organize.
Someone decides whether healthcare is a public guarantee or leverage attached to employment.
Someone writes the rules.
Someone else is usually told the rules are simply how the world works.
Throughout American history, Black labor has often been welcomed more warmly than Black freedom.
The Real Product Is Dependence
Capitalism is usually defended through the language of choice.
You are free to work.
Free to buy.
Free to sell.
Free to invest.
Free to start a business.
Free to leave a job you hate.
That last freedom looks beautiful in the brochure.
It becomes more complicated when leaving the job also means losing health insurance, missing rent, falling behind on the car payment, or discovering that one emergency has converted financial independence into historical fiction.
The law may say you are free.
Your checking account may have filed an appeal.
Economic insecurity changes how people behave.
A worker without savings may endure harassment because unemployment is unaffordable.
A parent may remain inside a destructive workplace because a child needs medical care.
A tenant may tolerate dangerous conditions because every available apartment costs more.
A citizen may stay home from a protest because one arrest, one missed shift or one public photograph could unravel the household.
That is not merely poverty.
It is control.
A system does not have to physically imprison people when it can make disobedience economically catastrophic.
This is why Jordan’s argument about autonomy matters more to me than another debate about whether the top tax rate should move a few percentage points.
Freedom requires more than permission.
It requires enough security to exercise your rights.
The Marbles Made Billionaire Power Visible
One image in Jordan’s video stayed with me more than any chart.
He represented each billion dollars with a small marble.
One marble equals one billion dollars.
At first, it feels like a school demonstration. Then the piles begin growing, and the abstraction becomes obscene.
Consider the City of Austin.
Austin approved a $6.3 billion budget for the 2025–2026 fiscal year. That budget supports the operations of a major American city: public safety, parks, utilities, roads, homelessness programs, employees and public services.
Place six marbles on a table.
Add roughly one-third of another.
That is an entire year of Austin’s municipal spending.
Now build another pile.
As of July 4, 2026, Forbes estimated Elon Musk’s net worth at approximately $997.1 billion.
Place 997 marbles on the other side of the table.
The city gets a little more than six.
One man gets nearly one thousand.
You could lay Austin’s annual budget beside that fortune more than 158 times before the piles were roughly equal.
One year of police and fire protection.
One year of roads and parks.
One year of public workers, sanitation, emergency response, housing programs, libraries, infrastructure and city government.
Repeat that entire municipal budget for more than a century and a half.
That is the scale of the second pile.
To be precise, net worth and a city budget are not the same financial measurement.
A billionaire’s net worth is the estimated value of assets minus liabilities at a given moment. It is not a checking account containing 997 billion-dollar bills.
A city budget measures planned annual spending. The City of Austin must replenish that money each year through taxes, fees and other revenue.
The comparison is not an accounting equation.
It is a demonstration of scale.
And scale becomes power.
Picture the table again.
Six marbles on one side.
Nine hundred ninety-seven on the other.
The city must hold elections.
It must publish budgets.
Its officials can be questioned, challenged, protested and removed.
Residents can attend council meetings, demand public records and organize against decisions.
The billionaire does not need your vote.
That is the part the marbles make impossible to ignore.
The danger is not that one wealthy man will walk into Austin and buy every traffic light before lunch.
The danger is that private fortunes now operate on the scale of governments while facing almost none of the democratic obligations we supposedly require from governments.
A person with that much wealth can purchase companies rather than compete against them.
He can finance political campaigns, legal fights, lobbying operations, media platforms, satellite systems, artificial-intelligence infrastructure and years of public messaging.
He can survive financial losses that would destroy entire businesses.
He can enter a market knowing that everybody else must remain profitable while he can afford to wait.
That is leverage.
The average person approaches the economy trying to survive within its rules.
The billionaire approaches with enough resources to influence the rules, hire the people who interpret the rules and purchase the platform where the rules are debated.
Once you see those two piles of marbles, phrases such as “equal opportunity” begin to sound like jokes told by the man who brought 997 marbles to a six-marble game.
When Wealth Stops Being Wealth and Starts Becoming Government
There is a difference between being wealthy and possessing private governing power.
A successful business owner may have more choices than an average worker.
A billionaire has the capacity to shape the choices available to millions of workers.
That is not merely a larger version of personal success.
It is a different category of power.
We often discuss billionaires as though they are ordinary rich people with nicer airplanes.
But extreme wealth changes the relationship between the individual and society.
A person with ten million dollars can live comfortably.
A person with nearly one trillion dollars can influence industries, governments, communication systems and the economic environment surrounding entire populations.
At that scale, money does not only purchase luxury.
It purchases reach.
It purchases patience.
It purchases access.
It purchases protection from ordinary consequences.
It can purchase the company that once stood as proof that capitalism could remain conscious.
This is where capitalism’s defenders often change the subject.
They ask whether the billionaire earned the money.
That is not the most important question.
The important question is why any democratic society permits one unelected person to possess resources comparable to those used to govern entire cities.
The issue is not jealousy.
I do not want 997 marbles.
I want to know why one person gets 997 while an entire city must explain every fraction of its six.
The Market Is Doing Fine. How Are You?
We are constantly told that the economy is strong because markets are rising and companies are becoming more valuable.
But whose assets are rising?
A market can soar while rent consumes half a paycheck.
A corporation can announce record earnings while cutting labor hours.
A technology company can attract billions in investment while producing a service customers never requested and cannot turn off.
The market is not the public.
A rising stock index does not automatically mean people have better healthcare, stronger schools, more leisure, greater privacy or more control over their lives.
It means assets became more valuable.
That is excellent news when you own enough assets.
It is more abstract when your primary holding is a 2014 sedan with a warning light that has developed tenure.
This does not mean ordinary people should avoid investing.
Retirement accounts, pensions, college funds and long-term investments help people survive a country that has steadily shifted responsibility for economic security away from public institutions and employers.
We were told to build personal portfolios because public guarantees became politically unfashionable.
Then we were handed an economy where many profitable companies make housing, healthcare and basic life less affordable.
It is a neat little circle.
The system extracts money from workers.
Some of what remains is placed into retirement funds.
Those funds invest in companies developing more efficient ways to extract money from workers.
The snake is no longer eating its tail.
It hired a financial adviser.
Why Labor Keeps Returning to the Center
Whenever I think seriously about economic democracy, I return to labor.
Not because unions are perfect.
Any institution run by human beings will eventually produce a committee, an expense report and somebody who should not have been trusted with the microphone.
But collective bargaining changes the balance of power.
A union gives workers a structure through which they can say no together.
No to unsafe conditions.
No to arbitrary discipline.
No to wages that shrink while executive compensation develops its own weather system.
No to being treated as a cost that happens to breathe.
That collective refusal may be one of the most democratic forces available inside a private workplace.
Political democracy gives citizens a vote over government.
Economic democracy asks why most citizens spend the majority of their waking hours inside institutions where they have almost no vote at all.
We elect city council members.
We do not elect the people who decide whether thousands of workers will lose their jobs so a stock price can rise before lunch.
We debate public budgets in open meetings.
Corporate restructuring happens behind closed doors and arrives by email.
The more I think about that contradiction, the further left I move.
I Am Not Against Business
Let me be clear before someone accuses me of planning to nationalize the neighborhood barbershop.
I am not against people starting businesses.
I am not against profit.
I am not against someone buying a home, investing for retirement or leaving an inheritance.
The owner of a food truck is not the moral equivalent of a private-equity company because both technically own assets.
Scale matters.
Power matters.
Necessity matters.
There is a difference between making money by producing something useful and making money by controlling access to something people cannot refuse.
There is a difference between renting a property and purchasing enough housing to influence an entire market.
There is a difference between creating technology and constructing an infrastructure so dominant that everyone else must surrender their data, labor or intellectual property to participate in public life.
There is a difference between wealth and rule.
My objection begins when private ownership becomes private government.
What I Mean When I Say I Am Leaning Toward Socialism
The word socialism has been dragged through so much American propaganda that many people hear it and imagine federal agents arriving to confiscate the family air fryer.
That is not what I mean.
I mean healthcare that does not disappear when a job does.
I mean workers possessing meaningful power over wages, schedules and working conditions.
I mean housing treated first as shelter and only second as a financial instrument.
I mean public services designed to serve the public rather than provide another revenue stream for contractors.
I mean strong unions, worker cooperatives, progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, public investment and limits on the ability of concentrated wealth to purchase political outcomes.
I mean an economy in which democracy does not stop at the workplace door.
Some of that is social democracy.
Some of it is democratic socialism.
Some of it is ordinary common sense wearing a red name tag because America always needs a villain.
I am still working through the definitions.
But I know what I no longer believe.
I no longer believe structural exploitation can be solved by shopping more carefully.
I no longer believe billionaires will regulate themselves after they finish purchasing the regulators.
I no longer believe every social problem can be repaired by finding a nicer chief executive.
I no longer believe a company’s good intentions can survive every change in ownership, leadership and financial pressure without enforceable protections.
And I no longer believe an economy should be called free simply because wealthy people have many choices.
So Where Should My Brother Invest?
I still owe my brother an answer.
I do not think the answer is to avoid investing completely.
Refusing to prepare for the future will not dismantle capitalism. It will merely make the future more expensive.
There is no perfectly clean corner of the market where every worker is respected, every supply chain is humane, every political donation is righteous and every board member returns the shopping cart.
Ethical purity is difficult inside an interconnected economy.
But moral surrender is not required.
My brother can ask harder questions.
Does the company build something useful, or merely control access?
Does it profit through innovation or desperation?
How does it treat workers?
Does its business model depend on surveillance, displacement, medical denial, environmental destruction or artificial scarcity?
Is the investment productive, or is it another tollbooth placed between people and something they need?
Those questions may not produce the highest possible return.
That is precisely the point.
Some returns cost too much.
Time Is the Asset We Keep Forgetting
Jordan ends his argument by turning away from the stock market and toward time.
That may be the most radical move in the entire video.
Capitalism teaches us to value ourselves through income, property, productivity and accumulation.
Even rest has been repackaged as preparation for becoming more productive later.
Apparently, lying down now requires a business case.
But time is the one asset nobody can recover.
A society that forces people to work longer hours, navigate more automated systems, perform more unpaid self-service and spend more of their lives managing tasks once handled by paid employees may be technologically advanced while becoming less civilized.
Sometimes the machine did not save us time.
It eliminated the person who used to assist us, charged us the same amount and handed us the scanner.
That is not innovation.
That is a shift change.
The question haunting me is no longer whether capitalism can produce wealth.
It plainly can.
The question is what kind of society it produces when nothing remains beyond its reach.
When housing becomes a portfolio.
When healthcare becomes leverage.
When personal data becomes inventory.
When corporate values become assets included in an acquisition.
When citizenship becomes another risk workers cannot afford to take.
When time itself becomes something we are expected to surrender, one “convenient” application at a time.
My brother asked me where he should invest.
The honest answer is that I am still figuring it out.
But I know this much:
I want him to build security without becoming blind to how that security is produced.
I want him to own something without believing ownership makes him worth more than somebody who does not.
I want him to invest in his future without financing a future where everyone else is permanently for rent.
Maybe that is the socialist in me beginning to speak.
Or maybe it is simply the part of me that still believes an economy should serve human life rather than requiring human life to kneel before the economy.
Either way, it is getting harder to ignore.
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