The Obvious Thing That Americans Ignore

To be fair, it may not be that we ignore this, it may be that like a fish is unaware of the water, Americans are unaware that our way of life permeated by ripoffs.

With a lax regulatory environment, and even laxer antitrust enforcement, we have a criminogenic society.

The American way of life is profoundly, deeply, and deliberately corrupt:

I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just life is. For no good reason at all.

When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over. American life is the biggest ripoff in the world. Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now stay poor.

………

How much do I pay for internet and TV in Europe? About thirty dollars, give or take. How much do I pay in America? $150. That’s five times as much. And what I get in America is way, way worse. At least half of the junk on TV is ads, I don’t get the wonderful and illuminating and sparkling stuff that European TV makes on a regular basis, from good coverage of global affairs to politics to economics to ground-breaking shows and movies. I’m getting massively, massively ripped off. Why? Let me answer, with another example.

Let’s take utility bills. They’re astronomical in America compared to the rest of the rich world, and even much of the rest of the world period. Heating, electricity, gas, water? These things can easily add up to $500 to $1000 dollars per month. That’s not even factoring in property taxes and maintenance costs and whatnot. Americans have no idea, but in Europe I’d pay maybe — maybe — half that, if even that much.

Why are these sets of bills so much bigger? Because of gigantic private monopolies. Internet and TV are monopolies in most of the country. Utilities in most states have similarly been privatized. What happens when you create private monopolies? They profiteer.

And then there are hospitals and prescription medicines.

The rip-off artists, whether they are phone companies, utilities, finance, or healthcare, have lots of money to make political donations, so they own the Congress and the regulatory state.

This will not end well.