The trouble here is that Americans tend to think about capitalism and socialism as opposites, with socialism being the ultimate evil. A great irony lies in the fact that this binary mindset developed post World War II as a result of the Red Scare, even while socialist controls on a capitalistic economy were giving American people some of the best standards of living the world had ever seen up until then.

I grew up at the tail end of that boom, experiencing a very good life with working class parents and neighbors, all of whom lived much better than their analogs today.

I grew up watching right-wing politicians like Ronald Reagan attack and eventually dismantle much of the social controls that kept working people prosperous and wealth more equitable. Politicians sold this dismantling with the perverse bait that we would all be better off if we just let capitalists have free reign. It'll all just trickle down, they swore to us. The nation will experience an economic boom like the world has never seen.

We didn't know that the real boom was already over and that we were all going to begin to become much poorer even as wealth concentrated among the elite, among real capitalists.

Today, 'socialist' is still a slur here in the United States. 'Capitalist' is still something to aspire to, because leaders just keep dangling that perverse bait in front of our noses, even though we're on a hamster wheel.