Walk onto a used car lot and you’ll hear the pitch: “Don’t worry about the price. Look at the monthly payment. You can afford it!” It’s the oldest hustle in the book. The bait-and-switch. But the joke is, the car lot never ends. The salesman follows you home, slips into a suit, and suddenly he’s the government, the bank, the boss. Everything you buy, every hour you work, every bite you eat becomes another “manageable payment” in a con game that runs straight from cradle to grave.
Inflation is their silent partner. Economists call it “a sign of a healthy economy,” as if watching your paycheck shrivel is some kind of patriotic sacrifice. You take out a mortgage, proud of the keys in your hand, and two decades later that same house has morphed into a debt-flavored treadmill: the belt running faster each year, your legs the only meat keeping the machine alive.
And here’s the cruelest gag: you don’t even own it. Pay off the mortgage, throw a party, frame the deed—it doesn’t matter. Property tax is waiting at the door like a drunk landlord with a baseball bat. Miss a few payments and the sheriff will be happy to remind you whose house it really is. Ownership, in this system, is a mirage. Capitalism works by mirroring ownership back at you—but the reflection is hollow. You don’t buy freedom. You rent permission.
Pile on income tax, sales tax, hidden levies baked into every transaction, and the truth gets naked: you’re not living in an economy, you’re living in a funnel. Your labor runs down the chute, upward, into the hands of people who haven’t broken a sweat in decades. The rich don’t get richer because they grind harder—they get richer because they own the damn treadmill, and you’re the one running yourself into the grave.
And the punchline? We call this freedom. We call it opportunity. We strap ourselves to the ride, smiling like doped-up carnival goers, pretending that spinning in circles is progress. It’s tragic, but also darkly hilarious: sold ownership, delivered debt; sold security, handed anxiety; sold progress, trapped in obligation. The only thing really moving in this funhouse economy is the money, climbing up into the champagne flutes of the people who designed the ride in the first place.
So what do you do with a system like this? You don’t topple it singlehandedly—that fantasy is just another product sold back to you on a bumper sticker, a campaign hat, or a Che Guevara T-shirt printed in bulk at a sweatshop. What you can do is puncture the illusion. Laugh at the absurdity. Redefine wealth not as accumulation but as time. Build smaller, stubborn economies with the people around you. Refuse to mistake your tax bill for rent on your own life.
Because the truth is brutal but liberating: the treadmill isn’t the destination. It’s the scam. And the only sane move in a rigged carnival is to step sideways—out of line, off the ride, and into the absurd freedom of standing still while the whole machine eats itself alive.