Gambling Is Ubiquitous Because People Know America Is a Scam

There is a rancid truth underwriting the American economy, one that everyone knows deep in their bones, a notion rooted both in fundamental instinct and math, and it seeps into every aspect of our economics and politics. The dirty secret many now understand is that a lot of wage labor is not enough to get by in America anymore. The past promise of working hard for 40 hours per week and getting a home and a retirement in return is gone for a significant chunk of this country, stripped away by capitalists whose only desire in their miserable lives is to have more than they currently do. This never-ending split between wages and productivity is the chart of this era. It explains everything if you look at it long enough.

You are lied to from an early age in America, all in service to a system designed to exploit you for the benefit of capital. You are told to amass five to six figures of debt to obtain a certificate allowing you to make above the median income in the United States. If you don’t do this, your ceiling is capped in the supposed land of opportunity, and your bootstraps are worthless. But for many who do, there are not enough high-wage jobs to make good on this promise, and many are weighed down by debt levels they cannot rid themselves of on a middle-class wage. The math is very simple, and as I have detailed before, many renters with average healthcare costs in major American cities can’t ever hope to save enough to both buy a house and retire.

 

Life in America is a trap laid by the capital class, and people increasingly know it. As a great man once said, it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. This is why many voters initially flocked to Trump, who promised to smash the status quo to pieces, and why younger generations are abandoning capitalism for socialism. The status quo has been untenable to a majority of the American populace for decades now, and capitalists’ inability to adapt to this new Gilded Age of their creation has led to myriad revolts against their system.

You don’t make it in America by being a good soldier and working nights and weekends for your boss anymore, that’s how you barely scrape by. No, the capital class has ensured that the only way to truly make it in America is to play their game and own assets like homes or stocks, or to exploit exploitative industries like crypto or options trading and win big. Labor is for suckers in a world built by capitalists. As dismaying as this turn towards degeneracy in American life is, when alleged humans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk game the system better than anyone else does, why would normal people think that meritocracy reigns supreme? Or that America places any value on values? Just win baby.

It should come as no surprise that as the rigged American game has become more apparent, various forms of gambling have proliferated. This is all being forced upon us to a degree but there is a large part of this that is just supply meeting demand. Crypto especially has risen in tandem with the growing distrust in the system since Bitcoin’s berth in the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, the event that truly revealed the American elite for who they are: a bunch of lying scammers willing to build a house of cards that can collapse the entire economy practically overnight. This year’s elite lurch towards Trump as his polls slip to their lowest ever was just confirmation of what we already knew: Trump is the perfect avatar for this generation of Epstein-adjacent American capital and the politically powerful who serve them. He is the norm at Little Saint James, not the exception.

Alongside this collapse in American standards came the rise of easy money. Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) in the wake of 2008 birthed an era of free money and cheap credit that created Elon Musk and the braindead Silicon Valley elite currently enacting an AI-driven plan to create mass unemployment. The bonanza of 2020-21 was actually ZIRP’s grand finale that created a perverse incentive structure which rules much of the gambling populace’s worldview to this day. Many folks thought we were at the dawn of a new era where anyone can buy a dog coin and escape their day-to-day life filled with wage theft, the largest form of theft in the United States that never gets talked about because our mainstream media is primarily a tool of imperialist capital. But once the great inflation print of November 2021 came along, the adults in the room and at the Fed realized the party was over, and that all this excess in the wake of 2008, combined with the pandemic’s supply shock, had created dangerous levels of inflation. Ever since then, the disconnect between how people feel about the economy and the numbers it spits out has only grown.

It’s impossible to understand this sea change in the populace without looking at it through the precarity of that period and the positive changes it produced which were then immediately stripped away. The pandemic had just shut us all indoors for a year, proving the fragility of a society already bursting at the seams as it ignored the lessons of 2008. For the first time in most people’s lives, the government truly helped them out, and even sent them checks. The labor market improved, giving people real power to pick their job and wage for the first time in a generation. We nearly eradicated child poverty in an instant. Everything we were told our entire lives was proven to be a lie in just a few months as we were forced to adapt to a true planetary crisis. We didn’t have to spend countless hours and dollars every week on commutes to offices to sit in front of a computer. Hell, you didn’t even need a college degree to get rich, you just needed a Twitter account and a dog coin. The entire façade of American economic life our elite had chipped away at for a generation while telling us otherwise came crashing down in just a few months, and in the rubble, new forms of easy money arose.

But prices for many basic goods like groceries remained high even as inflation came down, forcing many people to make their dwindling disposable income do more for them, incentivizing the rise of zero date options trading and same game parlays and memecoins and prediction markets and all other forms of lotteries. In what has been rightly termed the vibecession by Kayla Scanlon, the precarity most people feel since 2020 is not wholly imagined. Americans may not understand how the Fed works or how economic figures get reported, but we do understand our own budgets, and we have the data in major costs like housing and healthcare to back the rancid vibes up. This is a real problem, and it’s not a coincidence that as 70 percent of Americans say the economy is on the wrong track, the CEO of prediction market Kalshi is saying he wants to monetize “any difference in opinion.” The old world is dying, and new forms of capital are trying to meet our depraved moment in order to build a new one in their image.

People feel helpless, trapped by a system they know is designed to keep them under its boot. You are not valuable to the capitalist who pays your bills beyond the labor you provide them, and if they can find cheaper labor, like a chatbot that flatters the superficial sensibilities of our Charmin-soft American elite, they won’t hesitate to put you on the streets tomorrow. Profit is capital’s only principle, they have proven their inhumanity beyond a shadow of a doubt this year, and balance sheets are the only kind of shared reality they inhabit with us. New college grads are at the forefront of this evolution in capitalist theft, as their entry-level jobs are the most primed to be replaced by AI, and the jobs data is showing that’s already happening. How are you supposed to build a resume in an economy that tells anyone without one that you have no value to it anymore? Just go buy memecoins and AI stocks and make it in America that way.

When compared to the wage theft economy, it’s hard to blame desperate people for placing their hope in options, crypto, sports betting, and prediction markets. To be clear, none of this is healthy and gambling is a great way to lose money much faster than a capitalist stealing a chunk out of your paycheck every month before they replace you with a robot, but this all has collapsing empire vibes to it and it’s deteriorating by the day. It’s hard not to feel like 2008 was just a preview of the big bust to come. Soulless American capital is clearly Going For It, and in that context, why wouldn’t labor look out for number one and play the rigged game capital is playing when everyone knows that tying your future to them is the real gamble in our age of AI madness? The 2008 Great Financial Crisis revealed that Western capital had built a scam economy skimming off the top of the greatest economic engine in human history, the difference now is just that everyone gets to get in on it.

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