The Economy Should Serve The People

For years, the American people have been told that the global economy is a kind of divine force. They are told to accept its decisions with silent obedience. They are told that corporations must have their way, that markets must remain “free,” and that the people themselves must adjust to whatever the financial elite demands. This is the new gospel of the ruling class. Worship the market. Sacrifice the nation. Sacrifice your wages. Sacrifice your community. And above all, never question the high priests of Wall Street.

But a free people do not exist to serve markets. A nation is not a corporate experiment. A citizen is not an economic input. The economy is a tool. The economy is a servant. The economy is a machine that exists to benefit the people who built it. When that order is reversed, when the machine becomes the master and the people become the parts, the result is national ruin.

That is the position America now finds itself in. The politicians who promised to protect the citizen have sold him to global interests. Corporations that were built by American workers now treat those workers as obstacles to higher quarterly profits. Hedge funds dictate national policy. International capital moves across borders with the speed of lightning, while the American citizen is trapped under the weight of rising prices, falling wages, and shrinking opportunities. Entire communities that once had dignity and stability are now shells of their former selves. The people who created America’s prosperity have been forced to watch their own futures auctioned off to the highest bidder.

This essay is not an attempt to flatter the powerful or reassure the comfortable. It is a warning. A nation that forgets its people does not survive. A nation that allows its own citizens to be sacrificed to the demands of international capitalism is a nation that has surrendered its sovereignty. The American people face a simple truth. Either the economy is brought back under national control or the nation itself will continue to be broken apart piece by piece.

The purpose of this work is to make one point unmistakably clear. The economy must serve the people. The people must never serve the economy.

The American economy was once a thing of strength and substance. It was built on the hands of workers who forged steel, drilled oil, raised livestock, and ran factories that supplied the world. Our wealth came from creation, not manipulation. From labor, not leverage. From families and towns that produced real value. That world has been deliberately dismantled by the financial class that now rules Wall Street like a foreign power occupying our own shores.

Wall Street discovered long ago that it is easier to extract than to build. Easier to move numbers on a screen than to build a factory that employs fathers and mothers. Easier to offshore jobs than to invest in towns. And easier still to manipulate currency, debt, and assets than to contribute anything of meaning to the life of a nation. The financial class has achieved the perfect arrangement. They reap the profits. The American worker pays the price.

As finance grew, production shrank. Shipyards closed. Mills closed. Machine shops closed. Entire industries were uprooted and thrown into the garbage heap of globalization. This was not an accident. It was a strategy. A deliberate choice by the elite to trade the future of the nation for the quarterly earnings of multinational corporations. While the American worker watched his paycheck stagnate and his bills climb, Wall Street watched its bonuses soar and its influence become absolute.

The middle class that once provided the backbone of the republic now finds itself trapped in a financial system designed to bleed it dry. The new economy does not reward effort. It rewards speculation. It does not reward loyalty to one’s community. It rewards loyalty to shareholders who have no loyalty to anyone or anything. It does not reward the virtues that built the nation. It rewards a kind of parasitic cleverness that allows a man to get rich without ever producing a single useful thing.

The American worker now lives under a regime of financial domination that extracts wealth from every corner of life. Rent rises. Health care rises. Education rises. The cost of raising a family rises. But wages remain frozen in place because the financial class has decided that cheap labor and foreign markets are more profitable than American communities. Meanwhile, Wall Street’s political operatives assure the people that “the economy is doing great,” while millions of families struggle just to keep a roof over their heads.

This is not a free market. This is not capitalism in its healthy form. This is extraction. This is exploitation. This is the rule of a class that creates nothing yet owns everything. Until this system is challenged and dismantled, the American middle class will continue to fade, replaced by a permanent underclass living at the mercy of decisions made in skyscrapers far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens.

Wall Street has become an empire within a republic. And unless its power is broken, the republic will not survive.

The public has been told a simple story. America needs imported labor because Americans are not skilled enough, not smart enough, not prepared enough. This lie has been repeated so often that many have stopped questioning it. But the truth is obvious to anyone who looks past the slogans. The H-1B system was never designed to serve the American worker. It was built to serve the corporations that want cheaper labor and obedient employees.

The myth is that these visas bring in rare geniuses. The reality is that they bring in workers who can be paid less than Americans and who cannot easily quit or negotiate. That is the real attraction for corporations. They are not hunting for talent. They are hunting for leverage. A domestic worker can walk away from a bad employer. An H-1B worker cannot. That power imbalance is worth billions to the companies that rely on it.

This system has allowed entire industries to avoid raising wages for American citizens. Graduates who studied engineering, computer science, and technology discover that the jobs they were promised are already filled by a cheaper and more vulnerable labor pool. The predictable result is stagnation for the American worker and exploding profits for the corporations that replaced them. This is not innovation. This is a cost-cutting strategy dressed up in patriotic language.

The damage does not end at the workplace. When tens of thousands of workers are poured into a handful of metropolitan areas, the pressure on housing becomes unbearable. Rents skyrocket. Home prices soar. The cost of living becomes impossible for ordinary Americans. The people who built these cities with their labor and their taxes find themselves pushed out of the neighborhoods their families lived in for generations. Meanwhile, the corporations that created the housing crisis claim they bear no responsibility.

The truth is that the H-1B system has become a pipeline for wage suppression, housing inflation, and the erosion of opportunity for American citizens. It has created a two-tiered workforce. On one side stands the domestic worker whose wages are held down by artificial labor competition. On the other stands the imported worker who cannot fully participate in American life because his legal status is chained to a corporation. Both are used. Both are controlled. Both are tools in the hands of a system that values profit more than people.

Nothing about this arrangement is natural or necessary. It is the direct result of policy decisions made by politicians who answer to donors, not to citizens. These decisions were not made to strengthen the nation. They were made to strengthen the corporations that treat the American people as expendable. The H-1B system did not just import workers. It imported a corporate model that places the American worker at the bottom of his own economy.

Until this system is dismantled and replaced with one that defends the livelihood of American citizens, the middle class will continue to shrink and the American future will continue to be outsourced for the benefit of those who already hold all the power.

International capitalism tells the American people that borders are outdated, communities are sentimental relics, and nations themselves are nothing more than markets to be harvested. This ideology insists that loyalty belongs not to country or kin or shared history but to capital, which floats above the world like a wandering god. The American citizen, rooted in soil and family, is expected to compete with the entire planet as if he were a commodity on a trading floor. This is not a natural system. It is a weapon aimed at the foundations of national life.

Under this new order, the American people are no longer seen as the inheritors of a civilization. They are treated as interchangeable units of labor whose purpose is to feed profits into the machinery of global finance. Their wages are kept low by imported competition. Their rents are kept high by speculative investors. Their towns are hollowed out by corporations that flee to cheaper countries whenever the opportunity presents itself. They are told to move, adapt, and accept destruction as progress.

A nation cannot survive such an arrangement. A nation cannot remain stable when its own citizens are uprooted from their communities and scattered in search of work. When home ownership becomes a distant dream. When wages stagnate while the cost of living climbs like a fire up the side of a building. When a small minority of financial elites grows richer each year while millions of American families slide further into insecurity. No republic can withstand this degree of pressure. It fractures first economically, then socially, then politically.

The cracks are already visible. Communities that once had pride and coherence now struggle with despair and addiction. Young men who once had a future now drift without purpose or direction. Families are delayed or abandoned entirely because the economic foundation that once supported them has been stripped away. The American people are told to blame themselves for these conditions. Work harder. Move cities. Take on more debt. Learn to code. Lower expectations. Accept permanent instability as the new American lifestyle. This is the language of a ruling class that has given up any obligation to the nation.

International capital obeys no laws but profit. It recognizes no borders. It honors no communities. And any system built around its demands will eventually treat the citizen as a burden rather than a stakeholder. This is how nations die. Not through sudden invasions or dramatic collapses but through a steady erosion of economic independence, community stability, and civic belonging. The people lose faith. The institutions weaken. The center gives way.

There is no freedom in a nation where citizens cannot afford to live. There is no democracy in a nation where the economy is controlled by transnational powers. And there is no future in a nation that willingly hands over its prosperity to interests that do not share its fate. America cannot remain a sovereign nation if its people do not remain sovereign in their own economy.

International capitalism has created a world where the American citizen carries all the burdens while the financial elite collects all the rewards. That arrangement cannot last. A nation that forgets its people is a nation marching toward its own dissolution.

History is not a collection of dead facts. It is a warning to the living. And no warning is clearer than the fall of the Roman Republic, a civilization that committed the same economic sins America is committing today. Rome was not defeated by foreign armies. It was hollowed out from within by its own elites who placed profit above people and imported cheap labor until the backbone of the nation snapped.

After the Punic Wars, Rome conquered vast territories filled with millions of slaves. Instead of protecting the Roman farmer, the Roman aristocracy seized enormous tracts of land and built plantation estates worked entirely by slave labor. These latifundia became the Roman version of multinational corporations. They were too large to challenge and too profitable to regulate. The small landowning citizen, once the heart of Roman strength, could no longer compete with estates that paid no wages at all.

The result was ruin for the Roman middle class. Family farms were swallowed by oligarchs. Proud citizens who had tilled their land for generations were driven into bankruptcy. Entire communities evaporated. The people who once formed the backbone of the Roman legions, the very men who had defended Rome through centuries of struggle, were forced to abandon their fields and flee to the capital in search of survival. In the city, they found poverty, dependency, and the cold reality that their place in the republic had been erased.

As the middle class collapsed, a new elite rose in its place. These were not statesmen. They were speculators. They formed tax-farming syndicates. They loaned money at crushing interest. They bought political influence the same way they bought land, with bags of coin. They became a financial aristocracy that cared nothing for Roman citizens and everything for wealth without labor. They ruled without responsibility and enriched themselves without limit.

Rome responded to this crisis not with reform but with bribery. The state began distributing free grain to keep the masses quiet. Politicians bought votes with handouts. The Roman working class became dependent on the government because the economy had been stolen from them. Housing prices soared. Wages fell. The city swelled into a cauldron of resentment and instability. Just as in America today, the elites blamed the people for their own suffering while growing richer by the hour.

The political consequences were catastrophic. With no middle class to stabilize society, Rome plunged into upheaval. Populists clashed with oligarchs. Street gangs battled for control of neighborhoods. Corruption devoured the republic. The institutions that once held Rome together crumbled because the people who maintained those institutions had been destroyed. It was only a matter of time before strongmen arose, one after another, each promising to restore order to a nation that had abandoned its own citizens. And Rome never returned to republican freedom again.

Rome collapsed because it replaced its citizens with cheaper labor and replaced its statesmen with financial opportunists. It collapsed because it allowed greed to become a governing principle. It collapsed because it forgot that a nation lives or dies on the strength of its middle class. America is standing on the same ground Rome once stood on. The lesson is written in blood and ruins. A republic that allows its elites to sacrifice its people for profit is a republic that has already begun to die.

A nation cannot survive on promises, theories, or speeches. It survives on structure. On the hard architecture of economic life. On the ability of its people to work, to raise families, to own homes, to build futures. If the economy does not make these things possible, then the economy must be restructured. A nation does not bend to the marketplace. The marketplace bends to the nation.

The first step is simple. The interests of the American citizen must be placed above the interests of any corporation, investor, or foreign market. This is not radical. It is the normal duty of a sovereign government. The state must serve the people who built it. The citizen is the shareholder of the republic. His well-being is the bottom line. Everything else is secondary.

That means bringing production home. A nation that cannot make its own goods cannot control its own destiny. For decades, corporations moved factories overseas to chase cheap labor and higher profits. They did not care what happened to American workers. They did not care what happened to American towns. They cared only that the numbers on their balance sheets grew larger each quarter. A government worthy of the name would have stopped them. A government that serves its citizens will stop them now.

A renewed American economy must reward the building of things. It must reward the craftsman, the machinist, the engineer, the nurse, the teacher, the farmer, the truck driver, the builder. These are the people who make the country function. These are the people who deserve respect and protection. The nation rises when they rise. The nation declines when they decline.

The visa system must also be reformed from the ground up. No system that allows corporations to replace domestic labor can be defended. No policy that suppresses wages and inflates housing costs can be justified. American citizens should never be forced to compete with a labor pool deliberately imported to undercut them. A healthy nation trains its own people, invests in its own youth, and ensures that its own citizens have first claim to the opportunities of their homeland.

Housing must be treated as the foundation of national stability, not as a playground for speculators. A family that cannot afford a home cannot build a future. A community that cannot keep its people cannot remain a community. If the nation wants stable families and stable neighborhoods, it must make it possible for ordinary Americans to live where they were born, raise children where their parents raised them, and continue the life of the nation across generations.

A nation-focused economy is not a dream. It is a decision. It is a willingness to reject the poisonous idea that profit is the only measure of value. It is a commitment to rebuild the American middle class that has been gutted by decades of corporate greed and political cowardice. The American people have sacrificed enough. They have watched their factories close, their wages fall, their rents rise, and their futures shrink. They have upheld their end of the bargain. Now the nation must uphold its end.

If America wishes to remain a sovereign people, it must build an economic order that reflects the needs of the people, not the demands of the international elite.

 nation is not an economy. A nation is a people. A nation is a tapestry woven across generations. It is families who have lived on the same streets for decades. It is towns built by the calloused hands of workers who poured their strength into the soil. It is communities shaped by memory, loyalty, sacrifice, and shared struggle. If these people cannot remain where their fathers and grandfathers lived, then the nation has lost its meaning.

For too long, America has allowed international capital to uproot its own citizens as if they were weeds standing in the way of profit. Entire neighborhoods have been priced out. Entire regions have been stripped of their industry. Young Americans who should be building families are instead living paycheck to paycheck, crushed by usury and forced into permanent instability. This is not an accident. It is the direct consequence of an economic system that values profit more than heritage, markets more than people, and shareholders more than citizens.

No nation can survive such a betrayal. A republic that cannot protect the ability of its own people to remain in their communities is a republic in name only. It has become little more than a corporate zone governed by finance. If America is to remain a living nation, it must restore the simple truth that the citizen comes first. The purpose of the economy is to protect him. The purpose of the state is to defend him. The purpose of the nation is to guarantee that he can work, raise a family, live with dignity, and remain rooted in the place he calls home.

That means rejecting the usury driven system that drains the life out of American households. An economy cannot be based on debt, exploitation, and financial manipulation. It must be based on production, community, and meaningful work. It must guarantee that every American who wants to work can find employment that provides stability and purpose. It must ensure that wages rise with the cost of living. It must make home ownership a foundation, not a luxury. And most of all, it must safeguard the place of long-established American communities whose ancestors fought, labored, and sacrificed to build this country.

A nation that forgets its heritage forgets its future. A people who are driven from their own communities cannot pass down the traditions, values, and identity that hold a country together. When communities collapse, the nation collapses. When citizens become economic nomads, the republic dies. America must choose a different path. It must rebuild an economy that keeps its people grounded in the soil from which their families rose. It must put an end to policies that displace them. And it must restore a system in which work is dignified, families are secure, and prosperity is earned through labor rather than extracted through usury.

The truth cannot be avoided. The economy must serve the people. The people must never serve the economy. America’s future depends on remembering this truth and acting on it before it is too late. A sovereign nation protects its own. A strong nation uplifts its own. And a living nation ensures that its people can remain in the communities they built with their own hands. Only then will the American republic stand firm again.