Financial System as a Replacement for Neighbors, Friends, and Family

I'm in my mid forties. The United States of today is significantly different than the United States of my childhood in the 1970s. That world was not an ideal world--in a lot of significant ways it was worse. A lot of statistics, e.g. the per-capita murder rate, were worse for example. Pollution was worse. Viewing that world through rose colored glasses is a mistake.

It was significantly easier for regular people to make a living back then, though, and the financial system was structured to prevent the large scale fraud, crime, and systematic grifting that are a daily feature of life today. The con-men of Wall Street had been put in a box after the great depression--which was the era of my grandfather's youth, and my great grandfather's adulthood--and were only just being let out little by little. One round of post-depression banking deregulation happened under Jimmy Carter, which led to the Savings and Loan crime wave of the 80s, which  involved people like John McCain and the Clintons. Banks in my home town were shutdown and the mom and pops in my town were bailed out by the depression era FDIC.

Over the years, the financial "markets" have been a mechanism for many average people to get conned out of life savings, while at the same time pretending to be a secure and controlled environment where money can be managed to produce guaranteed returns and a stable income for old age. Indeed, without that costume of respectability and support by media, everyone on Wall Street would probably periodically be murdered.

Money's a dead thing. Financial assets are even deader than money. They need to drain people and living things to get a toe hold in the material plane. Many believe financial assets, probably because of their inert/symbolic nature, are more reliable and permanent than community, neighbors, friends and family. At the same time, the rules of the games that make financial assets "valuable" create systems like the stock market which systematically wrecks their communities. Their resources get sucked into the trash heap of Wall Street and the work that their neighbors once did ends up being done by Asian slaves.

People believe the hoarde of digits will preserve them in their dotage better than neighbors or family. It's led to a fairly shitty world.