The US innovation ecosystem is fueled by a culture of risk-taking, which is incentivized by a regressive tax system at the highest levels. The tax rate plummets for the wealthiest 1%, creating an enormous potential upside that encourages venture creation, despite the lack of a social safety net.

Extreme wealth creates a dangerous societal rift not just through inequality, but by allowing the ultra-rich to opt out of public systems. They have their own concierge healthcare, private transportation, and elite schools, making them immune to and ignorant of the struggles faced by the other 99.9%, which fuels populist anger.

Extreme wealth inequality creates a fundamental risk beyond social unrest. When the most powerful citizens extricate themselves from public systems—schools, security, healthcare, transport—they lose empathy and any incentive to invest in the nation's core infrastructure. This decay of shared experience and investment leads to societal fragility.

Well-intentioned government support programs can become an economic "shackle," disincentivizing upward mobility. This risks a negative cycle: dependent citizens demand more benefits, requiring higher taxes that drive out businesses, which erodes the tax base and leads to calls for even more wealth redistribution and government control.

Many self-proclaimed capitalists embrace the system only when it benefits them. True entrepreneurship involves accepting the risk of being outcompeted without complaint. Crying foul or seeking protection when a bigger competitor emerges reveals a hypocritical stance on free-market principles.

The system often blamed as capitalism is distorted. True capitalism requires the risk of failure as a clearing mechanism. Today's system is closer to cronyism, where government interventions like bailouts and regulatory capture protect established players from failure.

The US tax system disproportionately penalizes high-income 'workhorses' (e.g., doctors, lawyers) who earn from labor. In contrast, the super-rich, who derive wealth from capital gains and have mobility, benefit from loopholes that result in dramatically lower effective tax rates.

Instead of attacking wealth, a more effective progressive strategy is to champion aggressive, 'hardcore' capitalism while implementing high, Reagan-era tax rates on the resulting gains. This framework uses the engine of capitalism to generate wealth, which is then taxed heavily to fund public investments in infrastructure and education, creating a virtuous cycle.

Broad, non-means-tested stimulus programs, like the COVID CARES Act, function as the greatest intergenerational theft in history. They overwhelmingly benefit asset-owning incumbents by inflating housing and stock prices, while burdening younger generations with the debt used to finance the bailouts, effectively locking them out of asset ownership.