You walk into the grocery store, pay $8 for a carton of eggs, and silently curse “inflation.” But inflation isn’t an invisible hand; it’s a convenient scapegoat masking systemic corporate greed.
Every time you feel your wallet shrinking, a corporate executive is buying back company stock with your money.
We’ve been told a simple story: a pandemic broke the supply chains, geopolitics pushed up oil prices, and inflation was the inevitable aftershock. It’s bullshit. Dominant corporations realized they could artificially constrain supply, hike prices far beyond what the constraint justified, and then simply refuse to lower them.
Think about the meatpacking industry. Four companies control 85% of the U.S. beef supply. When processing plants shut down in 2020, meat prices skyrocketed. But when those plants reopened at full capacity, prices didn’t drop. Why? Because the big four learned that consumers had been conditioned to pay the premium. This wasn’t a market failure; it was a calculated market experiment.
The “free market” doesn’t self-correct; it just recalibrates until you stop fighting back.
Why do they get away with it? Because forty years ago, legal scholars convinced us that antitrust laws exist solely to keep consumer prices low. If you control the supply, you can artificially keep prices high while claiming you’re just “maximizing shareholder value.” It’s a hidden collusion. There’s no need for a smoke-filled room; they just read the same quarterly earnings reports and do the exact same thing: squeeze you.
The powerlessness you feel isn’t an accident. It is an engineered outcome. You’re told to vote with your wallet, but your wallet is useless when every store in town charges the exact same toll.
Manufactured scarcity is the ultimate form of legal robbery in the modern era.
Stop waiting for the market to correct itself. The market is rigged. Recognizing that your shrinking purchasing power is a deliberate strategy—not an economic cycle—is the first step. The next step is demanding antitrust enforcement that actually breaks up these monopolies and dismantles the companies actively punishing the consumer.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just basic inflation caused by money printing and supply chain shocks?
A: No. If it were basic inflation, prices would correlate with supply recovery. When supply chains fixed themselves, prices stayed artificially high. This is profit-maximizing strategy, not economic aftermath.
Q: What's the practical implication for the average consumer?
A: Stop accepting price hikes as inevitable. Vote for aggressive antitrust enforcement and support regulators who want to break up monopolies. Your wallet can't fix a rigged market, but policy can.
Q: Are you saying corporations are secretly colluding to raise prices?
A: It's not a secret conspiracy; it's a shared incentive. When a market is dominated by three or four players, they don't need to call each other to rig prices. They just follow the same profit-maximizing playbook.