I get stupid comments from Boomers, especially on Facebook. 🙄 Real quick can we stop calling Russia communist? The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 thats over 30 years ago. Russia has a flat tax lower than ours, private businesses everywhere, and billionaires running around on yachts in dubai. Whatever you want to call what Russia is doing its not communism. People hear “Russia” and their brain just autocompletes to “communist” like its still 1985. Its not. What they actually have is way more interesting and way more relevant to us than most people realize Everyone knows Russia is run by oligarchs right? But most people dont realize America has the same problem just running in the opposite direction In Russia the government controls the oligarchs. Putin is the boss. If a billionaire steps out of line he loses his company, goes to jail, or worse. The money exists because the Kremlin allows it to exist. Political power sits on top, economic power answers to it. In America its flipped. The financial system controls the government. Wall street doesnt answer to the president.. the president answers to wall street. Goldman Sachs guys rotate in and out of the Treasury dept like theres a revolving door because there literally is one. Banks committed massive fraud in 08 and instead of going to jail they got bailouts. exposed political spending is in the billions every cycle. Nobody has to make threats or send anyone to siberia. The incentives are just already built into the system. And heres the thing that should really bother you.. the American version is actually harder to fix. In Russia if you change the guy at the top, everything under him shifts. Its brutal but its fragile. In America you can vote out every single politician and the structure doesnt change because the oligarchy isnt sitting in the oval office. Its in the Fed, its in the regulatory agencies, its in the debt markets, its in the tax code. You cant vote out the primary dealer system. You cant vote out BlackRock. Both countries have a small class extracting insane amounts of wealth and influence from everybody else. Russia does it through raw political force. America does it through institutional capture that looks legal and boring so nobody gets mad about it. Thats the trick. Legal capture is still capture. its just capture that comes with a 401k so you dont ask too many questions. So stop being stupid by calling Russia communist. And stop thinking you’re more free than Russians. You’re just in a different kind of oligarchy.