Biz and Econ – The R.oB. Opinion

The K-Shaped Economy: Raging Moderates on the Moral Collapse of American Prosperity

Galloway and Tarlov’s Raging Moderates episode captures America’s moral divide: a K-shaped economy feeding the top 1 percent while MAGA normalizes hate and authoritarian awe. Between Gatsby’s glitter and populist rage, they find the same creed—power without empathy, cruelty mistaken for strength.

This summary was generated with AI assistance to capture the moral and political through-lines of Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov’s latest Raging Moderates episode.

The full conversation is worth your time; watch it here.

Podcast: Raging Moderates – “Trump’s K-Shaped Economy”
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Jessica Tarlov

1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, military families lined up at food pantries while Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago—girls in martini glasses, confetti over unpaid workers. That tableau, the hosts argue, is the moral diagram of the K-shaped economy itself.

“Budgets are moral documents.”

“America is a terrible place to be unfortunate.”

GDP may grow 3.8 percent, but for most Americans “the bottom 90 serve as nutrition for the top 10 percent.” Markets become morality plays; as Galloway notes, “As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything—even deploy secret police with masks.”

The metrics that matter are off-book:

Pawn-shop sales, auto-loan delinquencies, Hamburger Helper spikes.
Teen self-harm, anxiety, and hunger.

These, not the S&P 500, are the nation’s true balance sheet.
The “K” is a hieroglyph of our values—one arm ascending toward excess, the other collapsing into despair.

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

Later the hosts turn from money to morality. Their focus shifts to Nick Fuentes, whose praise of Stalin exposes what the MAGA movement has become: a coalition comfortable with white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarian awe.

“Strength and masculinity have been conflated with coarseness and cruelty.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a young man without economic or romantic opportunity.”

Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their online echo chambers reveal a movement that glorifies domination and calls it leadership. Algorithms amplify the poison because rage pays. Ben Shapiro, once an architect of grievance media, now looks aghast at the antisemitic monster it unleashed—a moral recursion too late to contain.

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

Between Gatsby’s glitter and MAGA’s rage lies a single creed: power without empathy. One end worships wealth; the other worships strength. Both treat human beings as expendable.

“Budgets reflect the values of a nation.”

When compassion is weakness and cruelty is currency, prosperity becomes performative. The republic mistakes spectacle for virtue, the algorithm for conscience, and domination for destiny.

Billionaires Should Exist

Billionaires aren’t the problem—rigged systems are. In any fair economy with risk and a healthy dose of luck, outliers will emerge. The challenge isn’t to erase them but to hold them accountable: fair taxes, honest competition, and reinvestment in the people who made them rich. That’s stewardship, not socialism.

(Version 1.1)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.

The Game Is Capitalism

If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META (gamer speak for Most Efficient Tactics Available), and compete to excel. The problem is that too many progressives want to play socialism while the rest of the world is still playing capitalism. They scold the game, refuse to play, and blame others for the loss.

Capitalism is amoral, not immoral. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.

The trick isn’t to stop them from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system after the fact. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal isn’t to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.^[1]

Jay-Z parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? Steven Spielberg? Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.

The Moral Obligation of Winners

When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So show gratitude — and afford them fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy, living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.

That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship.

The Progressive Error

Progressives often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. They attack wealth itself instead of the unjust systems that distort it believe they are one and the same. The result is they drive good people out of the arena. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.

The moral task isn’t to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.

The World I Want

I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.

If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.

The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎

It’s Complicated

The WaPo recently reported on Trump’s latest attempt to squirm out of his impossible campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border paid for by Mexico. It is equal parts clown action and cynical maneuvering.

An import tax is pure clown action because any tax that we impose Mexico can as well in retaliation. They are a sovereign nation able to levy any taxes they wish. And they’ve said that they will do exactly that and even go beyond. According to the WaPo:

Mexico’s economy secretary, Ildefonso Guajardo, said this week that Mexico is prepared to “mirror” any action by the United States to raise tariffs or impose taxes on imports. Guajardo has also said it might be necessary for Mexico to walk away from NAFTA — a once-unthinkable idea — if there was no benefit in the negotiations for his country.

And it’s not like we are immune to such retaliatory action:

Every day, goods valued at $1.4 billion cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and millions of jobs are linked to trade on both sides. Mexico is the world’s second-largest customer for American-made products, and 80 percent of Mexican exports — automobiles, flat-screen TVs, avocados — are sold to the United States.

So that $600 flat screen will now cost the American customer $720. That’s $600 plus $120 to pay the 20% import tax Trump imposed. After all is Best Buy or the TV manufacturer going to eat that cost? No. We are. And not just at the cash register. Try American jobs as well. Which brings me to the cynical maneuvering part of this story.

Trump knows damn well Mexico will not pay an import tax. Americans will. Sure such a tax hurts Mexican exports but Mexico can do much of the same damage to us. That’s why no one wins in a trade war, except perhaps the tax man, surely a high GOP priority. With Americans paying the import tax, Trump is attempting to bamboozle his supporters into thinking Mexico is paying for the wall in a “complicated form.” And like any con, the mark is always the only one who pays. Unfortunately, because marks can vote, we are along for the ride.

Take ‘Em to Church?

Gruber explains that profit is not to be sacrificed on the altar of market share. Continue reading →

You’re Supposed to Get What You Pay For

When you pay for something like foregoing taxes, government’s should get something in return. They’re our tax dollars right?

Job Creation and Job Quality Standards in State Economic Development Subsidy Programs | PHENND Updates:

“Report: States Spend Billions on Economic Development Subsidies that Don’t Require Job Creation or Decent Wages

Pennsylvania scored a D, tied for 40th place among the states

Pennsylvania is spending millions of dollars per year on corporate tax credits, cash grants and other economic development subsidies that lack wage and benefit standards for workers at subsidized companies and sometimes don’t require job creation, according to a new national report card issued by Good Jobs First.”

(Via PHENND .)

When you pay for something like foregoing taxes, government’s should get something in return. They’re our tax dollars right?

Beleagured Doesn’t Begin to Describe It

RIM can’t get even begin digging out of the hole it’s until late 2012. Continue reading →

Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater…Cheap!

Louis CK shows how a disintermediated artist can make money, control his/her brand, and provide added value to the customer. Continue reading →

Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater:

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. [emphasis mine] They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

(Via The Loop.)

Information on the internet is costly to produce, near costless to distribute, but marketing can be an issue, a costly one at that. Louis CK has an established brand so he can take the risks in production and let the viral nature of the Internet do its thing.

The experiment was successful but it’s not a game changer for Louis CK per se. (If you doubt that, you put out $250,000 for production and see how viral your show goes.) He just cut out a middle man, made more money and we saved some. That’s the game changer for the big distribution, really marketing, companies. Social networking is not good for their business model. Not at all.

Read his whole post. A lot to learn there.

Category: Biz and Econ

Billionaires Should Exist

The Game Is Capitalism

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

The Moral Obligation of Winners

The Progressive Error

The World I Want

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It’s Complicated

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You’re Supposed to Get What You Pay For

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1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

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Like this:

The Game Is Capitalism

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

The Moral Obligation of Winners

The Progressive Error

The World I Want

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Like this:

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