Originally published October 2023; revised October 2026.

Everything Is Broken...

You can feel it. Everywhere.

The anger. The fear. The helplessness, and a quiet despair spreading across every border, every ocean, and every political divide. The world has come loose from its moorings, and no one at the helm seems able, or willing, to steer it back.

Look at our democracies: stalled, polarized, and auctioned to the highest bidder, where money has been declared speech and the public is denied even the right to know who is paying.

Look at our media: corporatized, consolidated, and owned by a handful of the wealthiest people on Earth, profiting from the outrage and division it helps manufacture, all while the real story goes untold.

Then look closer to home.

Look at our health care system, a medical-industrial complex that can literally bankrupt you for getting sick.

Look at a world where the drums of war beat louder every year, from the Middle East to the Americas and beyond, and the companies that build the weapons have hit all-time highs and record order backlogs.[1]

Look at our national budget, where the most powerful nation on Earth has asked Congress for $1.5 trillion for our "Department of War," while proposing to cut non-defense discretionary spending by roughly 10% and actively working to dismantle our Department of Education.[2] And, on its face, shuttering the Department of Education might not even be the worst idea. Education was supposed to be the ladder that lifts each generation higher. Now, it's another revenue stream to be exploited. A financial product, sold at prices that, for decades, rose even faster than medical care. Students now owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans for a promise that may never arrive.

Look at our immigrants. We went from "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" to rounding them up by the tens of thousands and holding them behind razor wire. History has a name for that…

Look at the planet itself. Fires, floods, droughts, and heat break records year after year, ravaging every continent. And in the world's largest economy, federal agencies have been told to scrub the very words "climate change" from their websites and reports.[3]

From London to Lima, from Washington to the global south, ordinary people share the same conviction: the ground rules of modern life have snapped, and the institutions meant to serve us no longer do. Across a multitude of countries, most adults now expect their children to grow up worse off than they are.[4]

Yes, everything is broken...

...Except the Machine.

Amid all this human suffering, one machine runs with terrifying efficiency.

Corporate profitability.

As families struggle, communities unravel, and faith in the future collapses, corporate profits soar. The wealthiest grow wealthier. The machinery of accumulation keeps turning, faster and more efficiently than ever.

Corporate profits now take the largest share of the American economy ever recorded.[5] CEOs of America's largest firms now earn roughly 325 times what a typical worker earns. In 1965, it was 21 times.[6] Fortunes at the very top have reached extremes not seen since the Gilded Age.

And what do these record-breaking machines give back to the nations that make their profits possible? Less and less. In the early 1950s, corporate income taxes paid for roughly a third of the federal government. Today? Less than a tenth.[7]

What gets measured, gets managed!

And the most disturbing possibility of all?

What if these aren't two different stories?

What if the collapse of everything we value and the extraordinary profitability of the corporate machine aren't happening despite one another?

What if one is feeding the other?

And the Root Cause Is?

Root cause analysis offers a useful discipline: the Five Whys. Start with the symptom. Keep asking why. And refuse to stop at the comfortable answer. Let's follow the money. And the incentives.

The symptom: people no longer believe tomorrow will be better than today. Seven in ten say the American dream no longer holds true or never did.[8]

1. Why? Because the promise broke. About 90% of Americans born in 1940 grew up to out-earn their parents. For those born in the 1980s, it is 50%, a literal coin flip.[9] And today, only one in four Americans believes they still have a real chance to get ahead.[8]

2. Why did the promise break? Not mainly because the economy stopped growing. Economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that how growth was shared accounts for most of the collapse.[9]

3. Why did the sharing change? Because an increasing share of the fruits of our labor flowed to those who own capital rather than those whose work creates the wealth. Into corporate profits, stock buybacks, executive compensation, and fortunes at the very top. Lincoln told us plainly that labor comes before capital, that capital is only the fruit of labor.[10] We turned that truth upside down. The hands that planted the harvest were sent home with the chaff, and the grain was locked in the granaries of the few.

4. Why did so much more flow to capital? Because corporations were increasingly managed, measured, and rewarded for delivering returns to shareholders above virtually everything else. Hold down wages. Cut costs. Raise prices. Buy competitors. Shift costs onto society. And when laws or regulations stand in the way, spend money to change them. Not every company does these things. But when doing them produces greater shareholder returns, the system rewards those that do.

5. Why did maximizing shareholder returns become the overriding objective? Because of a premise. In 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of business was to increase its profits.[11] Economists, investors, consultants, corporate boards, and business schools helped elevate shareholder returns into the defining measure of corporate success.

In 1987, Gordon Gekko stood on a movie screen and told us that greed is good. He was written as the villain. A generation of bankers and executives took him as a role model.

And so an idea became an operating system. A way of measuring success that rewarded the accumulation of wealth while treating so much of what makes life worth living as a cost, a constraint, or somebody else's problem.

And there it is.

Not the cause of every problem confronting humanity, but something perhaps more insidious: a governing principle that rewards corporations for exploiting those problems, and too often punishes them for helping solve them.

Maximizing shareholder value has become the first commandment of our entire socio-economic system. And this catechism has, in turn, created incentives that concentrate wealth, corrupt institutions, undermine democracy, and subordinate human flourishing to financial returns.

And the inequality, the anger, the fear, and the helplessness? These are among the consequences metastasizing through the corpus of our humanity. And despair? That's what happens when people begin to believe nothing can ever change.

Our institutions aren't simply failing because the people running them are incompetent or evil. Too often, they're responding rationally to incentives that reward outcomes the rest of humanity cannot afford.

The machine isn't broken. It's doing exactly what we've rewarded it to do.

Free Markets Aren't the Problem. Shareholder Capitalism Is.

Hear this clearly: this is not a war on free markets.

Free markets, kept free of monopoly and the grip of oligarchs, are among humanity's greatest inventions. They unleash the creative fire in every human being. They reward the better idea, the harder effort, the bolder dream. They create opportunity, and opportunity creates hope.

Adam Smith knew it. The father of free markets never once called for maximizing shareholder value. He warned that those who manage other people's money grow careless and wasteful. He saved his fiercest words for merchants who conspire against the public.[12] He believed in markets. He did not bow to returns.

Shareholder capitalism is something else. It is a market with its soul cut out: a system that declares the corporation exists for one purpose only, to enrich its shareholders, and that every worker, every customer, every community, every child matters only as much as they serve that end.

And when their needs collide with shareholder profits, as they so often do, the shareholder wins. Every time.

And here is the secret its high priests never say out loud. If profit is your only god, competition is your enemy.

You don't win by building something better. You win by escaping the market altogether. Build the moat. Buy the rival. Trap the customer. Capture the regulator.

One of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors put it plainly: competition is for losers.[13]

So understand what we are fighting. Shareholder capitalism is not the triumph of free markets. It is their destroyer. Free markets are a garden that must be tended, fenced against monopoly and flooded with sunlight. Shareholder capitalism tears down every fence.

No prophet, no scripture, no moral tradition in human history ever commanded us to make a few owners richer above all else.

It is not a law of nature. It is not a law of the land.

It is an idea.

And we judge an idea by what it does to people.

People Count Only When They Pay

Under this premise, you are not a person. You are a line item.

Your wage is a cost. Your health is a cost. Your town's clean water is a cost. Your child's future is a cost. None of it has value in itself. It matters only when it pays.

Its defenders will tell you that good companies treat people well because it is good business.

Nonsense.

Monopoly, oligopoly, and a lack of competition preempt this whole notion. You do not have to treat any stakeholder with decency if you're the only sheriff in town.

And the idea that this notion might actually be true is even more horrifying: decency survives only as long as it is profitable. The moment it isn't, it is gone.

The mandate goes further still. Executives are trained not merely to maximize profit, but to maximize profit while crushing every risk to it.

Workers who organize are a risk. Customers who can walk away are a risk. Competitors are a risk. Governments wielding regulations and antitrust laws are a gargantuan risk.

Every human being or institution who can say no is a risk to be managed, contained, or eliminated.

Follow that logic to its end and look where we stand.

An economy where treating illness can be more profitable than preventing it. Where financing an education can enrich investors while impoverishing students. Where holding down wages can reward shareholders while workers fall further behind.

And here is the perversity: the more successfully a corporation extracts wealth from society, the more society may celebrate its success.

We have confused the creation of wealth with the extraction of wealth.

Creating wealth means making humanity more prosperous. Building something better. Solving a problem. Improving lives.

Extracting wealth means making yourself richer without making anyone else better off. Capturing value others created. Exploiting market power. Shifting costs onto the public. Taking more from the world than you give back.

Both can produce extraordinary profits.

But one makes the world richer. The other merely makes its owners richer.

And we have built an entire economic system that struggles to tell the difference.

How a Premise Became a Religion

None of this was inevitable. It was built, and within living memory.

There was a time when America's industrialists spoke a different language. Henry Ford raised wages and cut prices, and declared that his company existed to do as much good as it could for everyone it touched, and only incidentally to make money. His own shareholders sued him over his plans. And won a judgment compelling dividends.[14]

Even so, for much of the twentieth century, corporations were widely expected to recognize obligations to their workers, their customers, and their country.

Then, in 1970, Milton Friedman published a manifesto of his own in The New York Times: the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[11]

Then, the idea got muscle. In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo urging American business to organize politically and exert greater influence over the country's courts, campuses, media, and public institutions. Two months later, he was nominated to the Supreme Court.[15]

Economists recast executives as hired hands, to be disciplined by shareholders. Regulators threw open the floodgates to stock buybacks. Corporate raiders punished companies that resisted demands for higher financial returns. Executives were paid in stock, chained personally to the share price.

Consultants carried the gospel from boardroom to boardroom. Corporate lawyers built it into governance structures and pay packages. Courts generally gave boards broad discretion, while financial markets made shareholder returns an increasingly powerful measure of success.

Within a generation, a premise became a religion: preached in business schools, practiced in boardrooms, enforced by financial markets.

In 2009, Jack Welch, its most celebrated high priest, finally called shareholder value "the dumbest idea in the world."[16] By then it was too late. The religion no longer needed its priests.

When the Player Buys the Referee

When Friedman wrote his essay on the primacy of shareholder capitalism, to his credit, he offered one condition: play within the rules of the game. But who writes the rules?

In a democracy, we do. The people do. And here the fatal contradiction reveals itself. Shareholder capitalism depends upon laws, regulations, courts, and institutions to make markets function. And those same institutions can limit profitability as well. Paying workers a living wage does not maximize shareholder returns. Preventing pollution does not maximize shareholder returns. Enforcing competition can destroy monopolistic pricing power. Taxing profits reduces the amount left for shareholders. So, what happens when the corporation is rewarded not only for winning within the rules, but for changing the rules in its favor? Democracy itself becomes a cost to be managed.

And that is why, to the machine, the people are the greatest risk of all. A free people can tax the powerful. Break up monopolies. Protect workers. Clean the air, and demand truth. A free people can rewrite every rule the machine depends on.

So the machine does what it was built to do. Manage the risk. Not by abolishing government. It needs government to guard its property, enforce its contracts, and bail it out when its bets go bad. The machine desperately wants a protective state, just not a democratic one.

The machine wants to privatize profits and socialize externalities. Government of the shareholders, by the lobbyists, for the returns. And no secret cabal is required. Every lobbying dollar, every campaign check, every Super PAC, every captured regulator can be understood as a rational hedge against volatility risks to profit streams. Add them up and you get a decades-long assault on self-government that no one ever voted for.

This is the fatal flaw at the heart of the premise. A doctrine that claimed legitimacy only within fair rules created powerful incentives to buy influence over those rules. The game becomes rigged, and it is rigged by the people winning it.

The Epitaph No One Would Choose

No one, at the end of their life, wants their epitaph to read:

Here lies a person who helped maximize shareholder value.

(Read: Here Lies David Gould. He Helped Maximize Shareholder Value.)

No mother. No soldier. No teacher, nurse, farmer, or engineer.

Not even a CEO.

Yet for half a century we have run our civilization on exactly that sentence.

We traded human dignity, civic sanity, and generational hope for quarterly returns. We built a machine that feeds upon the many to gorge the few, and then called it the natural order of things.

It is not natural.

It is a choice.

And what was chosen can be unchosen.

The stakes are about to rise. Artificial intelligence promises the greatest leap in productivity in human history.

Fed into this machine, those gains could flow where so many gains have flowed: upward. Everything described here could accelerate, faster and deeper than anything we have yet seen.

Shared with the people whose lives and labor made them possible, those same gains could renew the oldest promise we have: that tomorrow will be better than today.

(Read: AI Didn't Take Your Job. Your CEO Did.)

Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Neither can a world that treats most of humanity as fuel for a ledger. This is not left against right. It is not one nation against another, one race against another, one faith against another. It is humanity against a premise that has forgotten what humanity is for.

The future belongs to the living, not the ledger.

That is why 2B exists. To name the premise. To expose the machine. To demand an economy built for the only purpose that ever mattered: human flourishing.

No one would choose maximizing shareholder value as the epitaph for their life.

It is time we stopped choosing it for our world.

Sign your name. Restore humanity to humanity. → 2b.org

Endnotes

1. 24/7 Wall St., "Lockheed Martin Rockets 10%, RTX Jumps 7% on Beat-and-Raise Quarters and Record Backlogs," July 23, 2026. 247wallst.com
2. CBS News, "Trump's 2027 budget asks Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, with 10% cuts elsewhere," April 2026. cbsnews.com
3. Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School, "USDA Employees Ordered to Delete Web Pages Discussing Climate Change." climate.law.columbia.edu
4. Pew Research Center, "Views of children's financial future," January 9, 2025 (median of 57% across surveyed countries say children will be worse off). pewresearch.org
5. Fortune, on corporate profits' record share of GDP, February 23, 2026. fortune.com; Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, "Profits Without Peril," 2026. richmondfed.org
6. Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay report, 2026 (CEOs at the 350 largest U.S. firms, 2025), via Scripps News, September 29, 2026. 10news.com
7. Economic Policy Institute, "Corporate taxes as share of federal revenue, 1952–2015." epi.org; Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: Fiscal Year 2025 ($452 billion of $5.235 trillion, 8.6%). cbo.gov
8. WSJ-NORC poll, July 2025, via Axios, "Belief in the American dream hits record low," September 2, 2025. axios.com
9. Raj Chetty et al., "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940," Science, 2017. Summary via Stanford SIEPR. siepr.stanford.edu
10. Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
11. Milton Friedman, "A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970.
12. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book I, Chapter X and Book V, Chapter I.
13. Peter Thiel, "Competition Is for Losers," The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014.
14. Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich. 459 (1919).
15. Lewis F. Powell Jr., "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 23, 1971. Nominated to the Supreme Court October 21, 1971.
16. Jack Welch, interview with the Financial Times, March 2009.