There’s an intentional attempt, mostly successful, to conflate capitalism with free markets, though a free market can exist without capitalism. Capitalism is built on the concept of imaginary money, where more money is made from money, all of it imaginary, and making money is the ultimate goal. Free markets are centered around productivity, and productive members of society are easily identified because they produce something. Values like the “Protestant work ethic” seems quaint by today’s standards when the goal of every young person is to be an online influencer making money simply by being adored by everyone else. Even if some conservative has the outdated value of, “a day’s pay for a day’s labor,” in reality, the pay is not worth the labor, and lots of people, maybe most, get more than a day’s pay producing nothing.

Investing is the idea that you need not work if you’re so elite that you get to siphon off other people’s money. Unfortunately, it works; investors are some of the wealthiest people in the world, and they seemingly did little or nothing to get that way. This is only possible with capitalism. Extreme wealth concentration is not possible in a free market because money is limited to the finite productivity of individuals. But wealth concentration is the goal of capitalism; in fact, it’s the inevitable result, and every capitalist imagines they too can get rich doing nothing, and a lot do. Capitalism results in the imaginary supplanting reality.

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