Money for nothing, Chicks for free

American capitalism has failed us

The 1980s were the golden years of capitalism in America. Ronald Reagan was its cheerleader-in-chief, and the movie Wall Street, released in 1987, made famous the iconic line, “Greed is good.” Before that, in 1985, a relatively unknown band named Dire Straits released its now famous single, “Money for nothing,” along with an equally groundbreaking video, the first ever to be aired on MTV Europe. The song was inspired by the band’s frontman, Mark Knopfler’s own experience in an electronics store. There, standing alongside a delivery guy in overalls staring at a wall of TVs playing the MTV channel, he listened to the working man rail against the lifestyle of the rock stars. Here I am working hard and making a pittance, while the rockstars get money for nothing and chicks for free, the man railed. One of the most iconic songs of the 1980s was born thus. Capitalism had already begun to fray in America back then. We were too busy watching MTV to notice it.

I grew up in socialist India, where as a boy, I had a visceral fear of being unemployed and avoiding family functions if I didn’t go to the right college. It’s how it was back then. You needed to know someone to get a job. It took a year or three just to get a telephone connection, if you could pay for one at all. Nothing ever got done without bribing someone or the other. There were only two types of cars, and few could afford either of them. Both my parents were well educated and hard working. In America, they would have vaulted into the upper middle class or even got rich by virtue of their work ethic and intellectual horsepower. In India, they stayed middle class throughout their lives until they retired.

By 1989, I had arguably one of the best and highest paying entry level jobs in the land, as a Systems Engineer from Tata Steel. It was one of the first corporate IT jobs in the country. Yet I took the first flight out of India. By then, the fear of and the disgust for “the system” was far too strong to overcome. I knew nothing about America other than they had cowboys, money for nothing and chicks for free. I was willing to roll the dice because anything had to be better than what India was back then. Just a few years after I left, India liberalized and became more capitalist, and here we are, decades later, marveling at its transformation. Delighted, I went back to live in India for over a decade before moving yet again back to California.

All of this is to say that I am no stranger to either capitalism or socialism. Having escaped the clutches of crony socialism, I turned fiercely capitalist when I got here. America treated me well, and in turn, I became its citizen and have tried to be a good and loyal one. But I have to say, the decades spent in America have taught me that all is not well with capitalism either.

I believed in free markets until I learned that few markets are free. To be fair, markets start out as free and open. In the early 20th century, there were hundreds of car companies. There was fierce competition at first, and then there were three left. When leaders emerge and markets consolidate, they become no longer fair and free. The incumbents become too big and powerful. When you’re powerful, there is a tendency to ignore the rules or change them to suit your needs. The pharmaceutical industry is another example. Wall Street investment banks are another. Somewhere along the way, markets fail and become corrupted, and capitalism starts to fail to resemble itself.

The only exception to this rule has been the technology sector. It is one of those breathtakingly unique industries in which each wave of innovation brought about by the market leaders ironically made it cheaper and easier for upstarts to challenge them. There are few parallels anywhere else, if at all. The saving grace of my career is that I got to spend some time in this sector. Even here, in Silicon Valley, where everyone drives a BMW and there are long lines outside the Gucci store, capitalism has begun to fray. For the first time ever, there is a generation of workers who, even as they make hefty paychecks, despair if they’ll ever be able to buy a home.

There was a time there were only two Americas, rural and urban. Now we have probably ten or fifteen Americas. There is the America of the top 0.1%. There is the America of the next 20%. Then you have the Black America, the single mother America, the Gen Z and millennial women America, the incel America, the crypto bro America, the racist America, and so on. Social media has made it easier and costless to find each other and form these micro-Americas. Each America marches to its own drumbeat and has its own leader and spokespeople, who are all busy talking past each other.

There is one thing that appears to be uniting them – a growing disillusionment with capitalism. When it is time to pay the bill at a supermarket, there is no ideology. You’re neither a Democrat nor a Republican. You’re neither a socialist nor a capitalist. You’re neither white nor black nor brown. There are only prices on a piece of paper, and you must pay the bill. It’s not the fault of capitalism that we have inflation. But it sure isn’t helping solve the problem of price gouging, rising rents and home prices. On one hand, you have folks with 1,500-dollar iPhones paying a thousand dollars to attend a Taylor Swift concert, and on the other, you have someone maxing out their credit cards to pay an emergency hospital bill. On one hand, you have parents with 2% interest rate mortgages and multi-million-dollar homes, and on the other, you have their children frustrated with being unable to afford 6.5% mortgage rates and sky high price tags for homes. On one hand, you have upwardly mobile young women, in larger numbers than ever, making good money and emancipated from the drudgery of domesticity, and on the other hand, you have young men with no role models, falling behind in larger numbers than ever, and disenchanted with the world at large. It’s no wonder there is a market and audience for any idea, no matter how zany or radical it may be.

Capitalism is what made America the greatest nation on Earth in the Industrial Era. But it may be the thing that destroys us in the end. Vast amounts of capital, unchecked by corrupt or ignorant policy makers, is being deployed towards developing technology designed to make human labor obsolete. This will be our undoing. It will be the world’s undoing. There are people working hard right now on things that will put millions out of work in a decade. This is happening right under our noses in broad daylight. No one is talking about it, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. Capitalism takes ideas and turns them into whirlwinds. It has no way of knowing a good idea from a bad one, when it comes to societal ramifications. Social media was a bad idea. Yet billions were spent on it because it is lucrative to be able to hold people’s attention for six seconds at a time. Facebook made billions even as it shrunk and withered away our attention spans. Now that we all need our shots of dopamine every five minutes and have become largely useless, our overlords want to replace us with software and robots. We can’t even be trusted to drive our own cars anymore. Cars will soon drive themselves.

I like to believe that, somewhere along the way, the road will turn sharply towards a Utopia, even if things look gloomy right now. Someday, we will get money for basically nothing, maybe not chicks for free, and we will be free to unleash our creative spirits with abandon. For that road to emerge, America will need to embrace its inner socialist. We the people will need someone on our side to distribute the profits made by robots, self-driving cars and AI girlfriends back to us in some form or shape.

I still carry the memories from my childhood of the struggle to achieve escape velocity and break free of the drudgery of a middle-class existence by finding a well-paying job. I cannot believe that capitalism is leading us to the same place of rampant unemployment I once fled from. I cannot believe that I am now on the other side, with the socialists. And yet here I am. Time has a way of rendering the most sacred of cows irrelevant. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. There is a choice looming ahead of us.

Have a good weekend!