There’s A Lot Of Honest Pain Out There

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

Yesterday, someone left a comment on my post about Zohran Mamdani that stuck with me in a way few internet comments ever do. It wasn’t defensive or hostile—it was sobering.

The commenter challenged me, not to just oppose Mamdani’s ideology, but to think about why his message resonates at all. Here’s what they said:

“You really ought to ask yourself: why does his message resonate? Why did Russia have a revolution? People don’t wake up, make the espresso, make an omelet, look out the back window across their deck, the lake, the boat, ready for a day of country living, and say ‘You know what, honey… how about we start that revolution today?’ Nobody does that. Revolutions are made by very unhappy people. Why are they unhappy? Mostly because society largely doesn’t work for them… There is a lot of pain out there, and a lot of it is honest pain.”

They’re right. There is a lot of honest pain.

And if you’ve followed anything I’ve written over the last several years, you know I’ve been screaming into the void about how broken our monetary system is. We have created an economy where the top 10% get wealthier with each crisis, while the bottom 50% watches their standard of living deteriorate. I’ve described it here when talking about the GameStop crisis (33:40).

The frustration bubbling beneath the surface is not irrational. It’s earned.

People are watching the price of everything explode—housing, food, healthcare, energy—while wages stagnate. Meanwhile, Wall Street breaks records quarter after quarter. That disconnect doesn’t feel like capitalism to the average person. It feels rigged.

So when someone like Mamdani shows up and says “seize the means of production,” it doesn’t sound crazy to people living paycheck to paycheck. It sounds like maybe, finally, someone is taking their suffering seriously.

But here’s the part no one wants to talk about—especially not in polite political circles: the real culprit behind this pain is our broken monetary system. And both parties are to blame.

I laid this out in March, and it bears repeating. The U.S. is now at $35 trillion in federal debt. That number alone is alarming—but the speed at which we’re accumulating debt is what’s truly terrifying. Since 2020, we’ve added over $12 trillion. No one in D.C. talks seriously about it because monetary policy is the third rail. Touch it and you’re finished.

Worse, Democrats have embraced a mindset that spending can and should be infinite—as if the dollar is magic and gravity no longer applies. They’ve adopted the pseudo-academic gospel of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which argues the Fed can just print money without consequences. This idea has infected the left’s fiscal agenda with delusional confidence that everything can be free, deficits don’t matter, and taxes can rise forever.

But as I pointed out before: MMT doesn’t help the poor. It accelerates wealth inequality. I noted this in March 2025 using this chart:

The more the Fed prints, the higher asset prices go. Who owns the assets? The top 10%. Who gets wrecked by inflation? The working class. Every time the Fed steps in with more easing, more QE, more bond buying, the rich pull further away from everyone else. Look at the chart of wealth distribution over the past 30 years—it’s not just widening, it’s going vertical. And it’s not just happening by accident. It’s a direct consequence of our monetary policy.

Democrats say they care about “equity,” but their economic policy ensures the exact opposite. The bigger government gets, the more it feeds on debt, the more the Fed has to monetize it, and the more billionaires benefit. This is not some conspiracy. It’s math. It’s observable. It’s policy. And it’s failure.

I understand why people are drawn to Mamdani’s message. When you’re crushed by rising costs and watching others get rich doing nothing but holding assets, radical solutions sound appealing. But replacing broken monetary policy with socialism isn’t just wrong—it’s disastrously wrong. Every society that’s tried it has ended up worse off: Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, Venezuela, Cuba. The promises are always the same—fairness, justice, redistribution—and the results are always scarcity, repression, and collapse.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the problem isn’t too much capitalism. The problem is we don’t have capitalism at all. We have central planning by unelected technocrats who distort markets, crush price signals, and rob the average American of any real shot at building wealth. And Democrats, for all their talk of the working class, are pushing harder than ever toward a centrally planned future with no brakes.

The solution isn’t to seize the means of production. The solution is to restore sound money, shrink the size of government, and reintroduce real market discipline. That’s how you give people a shot—not by handing them utopian slogans, but by fixing the corrupt system that’s keeping them down.

There’s a lot of honest pain out there. And that pain deserves a real answer. MMT is not the answer. Socialism is not the answer. A return to true capitalism—not cronyism, not corporatism, but honest, competitive markets—is the only way forward.

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