The Capitalist Veto: Why America Cannot Build What Its People Need

Solar waits, patients suffer, and workers sit idle while corporations demand maximum extraction. This exposes the grand economic con behind “free markets.”

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Summary

America has the workers, technology, resources, and urgent projects necessary to build a prosperous, sustainable society. Yet the nation routinely leaves people unemployed, infrastructure deteriorating, patients untreated, and clean-energy projects stalled because private capital cannot extract enough profit. That disconnect exposes the central economic fraud: human need does not authorize progress—capital does.

• Profit operates as a veto over public progress. When workers need jobs and communities need housing, transportation, schools, healthcare, and infrastructure, an economy should connect those workers with that work. When it cannot, the failure belongs to the economic system—not to the people.

• Clean energy remains trapped behind corporate and institutional barriers. The Energy Department estimates that suitable American rooftops could support more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Yet approximately 8,200 proposed power projects—representing 1,312 gigawatts of generation and 749 gigawatts of storage—remained in grid-interconnection queues at the end of 2025. The technology exists, but the system obstructs deployment.

• Fossil fuels appear affordable because corporations transfer their real costs to the public. The IMF estimated $6.7 trillion in implicit fossil-fuel subsidies in 2024, primarily from prices that failed to account for air pollution, climate damage, and other social costs. Oil companies collect the profits while families absorb the illness and governments pay for the destruction.

• Private health insurance profits by standing between patients and medical care. The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, including $1.64 trillion through private insurance, while households still paid $556.6 billion directly out of pocket. HealthCare.gov insurers denied 19 percent of in-network claims in 2023, exposing a system that collects premiums while restricting access to care.

• Medicare Advantage demonstrates the cost of privatizing a public program. MedPAC estimates that Medicare will spend 14 percent more—approximately $76 billion—in 2026 on Medicare Advantage enrollees than traditional Medicare would spend covering comparable patients. A federal watchdog also found that insurers reversed 95 percent of appealed skilled-nursing admission denials, raising serious questions about the legitimacy of the original denials.

• Taxpayers finance medical innovation while corporations capture the monopoly reward. NIH-supported research contributed to 354 of the 356 drugs approved between 2010 and 2019, representing approximately $187 billion in public investment. Pharmaceutical companies perform important development and manufacturing work, but they do not create medicines independently of the public.

America does not lack productive capacity. It suffers under an economic structure that gives private capital control over what gets built, which technologies reach the public, and who receives necessary medical care. A democratic society must use markets as tools while refusing to let profit determine the limits of human progress.

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America’s Grand Economic Con: When Profit Blocks Progress

America calls its economy the most advanced in the world. Politicians praise its innovation, efficiency, and freedom. Corporate executives insist that private markets always allocate resources better than democratic government. Yet Americans should judge an economic system not by its advertising but by its results.

Here is the test.

Millions of people need useful, dignified work. Communities need affordable housing, modern electrical grids, clean water systems, public transportation, renewable energy, teachers, nurses, caregivers, and rebuilt infrastructure. The workers exist. The work exists. The raw materials exist. The technology often exists.

But the work does not get done.

Why?

Because under the American economic system, human need does not authorize production. Available workers do not authorize production. Environmental necessity does not authorize production. Even technological feasibility does not authorize production.

Capital authorizes production.

A project moves forward only after somebody with money determines that the project will return enough additional money to justify doing it. If society desperately needs something but investors cannot extract an acceptable return, the economy frequently treats that essential project as economically impossible.

That is not a law of nature. That is a political choice disguised as economics.

Consider the unemployed worker standing beside a deteriorating bridge. Society has a person capable of working. Society has a bridge that needs repair. Steel, concrete, engineering knowledge, and construction equipment all exist. The barrier is not physical. The barrier is not technological. The barrier is an accounting system that says the work cannot proceed until financing arrangements produce an acceptable return for capital.

When private investors cannot monetize the bridge sufficiently, politicians suddenly tell the public that the country “cannot afford” to repair it. But the country has the labor, the equipment, and the material. What it supposedly lacks is permission from the financial system.

That exposes the first fraud: money, which society created as a tool for organizing production, has become a gatekeeper that prevents society from using its own productive capacity.

Public investment can increase demand in the short term and improve productivity over the longer term. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that infrastructure, education, and research investments can strengthen economic productivity. Yet America regularly leaves necessary work undone because private capital cannot capture all the benefits.

A repaired bridge benefits commuters, emergency vehicles, businesses, families, and the entire regional economy. A healthier child benefits that child, the family, the school, and eventually the workforce. A stable climate benefits everyone, including generations not yet born.

Because no single corporation can place a tollbooth around all those benefits, private markets systematically undervalue them.

And when government proposes doing what private capital will not do, the beneficiaries of the status quo shout one word: socialism.

That accusation serves a purpose. It protects private control over public necessities.

When the government subsidizes oil companies, protects pharmaceutical patents, guarantees private insurance markets, finances medical research, rescues banks, or purchases weapons from defense contractors, corporate America rarely calls it socialism. But when government proposes publicly generating electricity, directly financing medical care, building affordable housing, or employing people to repair their communities, suddenly the free-market sermons begin.

Corporate welfare apparently counts as capitalism. Public benefit becomes socialism.

Energy provides one of the clearest examples.

America possesses enormous rooftop solar potential. The Department of Energy estimates roughly one terawatt of solar potential on buildings, while National Renewable Energy Laboratory research found that residential rooftop solar could generate nearly 1,000 terawatt-hours annually—about three-quarters of residential electricity consumption.

Not literally every roof can support solar. Some roofs have excessive shade, poor orientation, structural limitations, or insufficient space. Rooftop wind is even more location-dependent because turbines need suitable wind speeds and relatively undisturbed airflow. But the larger point remains undeniable: millions of American buildings could become distributed power stations.

Imagine treating that capability as public infrastructure.

Local governments, public utilities, cooperatives, or a national green bank could install solar panels and batteries at scale. They could prioritize low-income households, schools, warehouses, apartments, churches, municipal buildings, parking lots, and commercial rooftops. Bulk purchasing could reduce equipment costs. Standardized permitting could eliminate needless complexity. Public financing could spread costs across decades instead of demanding immediate returns.

The electricity could lower household bills, strengthen grid resilience, reduce pollution, and create hundreds of thousands of useful jobs.

Instead, the American homeowner often enters a maze of contractors, lenders, tax credits, leases, sales commissions, credit checks, utility rules, interconnection delays, and complicated contracts. The sunlight is free, but the financial extraction system surrounding access to that sunlight is not.

Even the solar industry’s “soft costs” reveal the problem. Customer acquisition alone represented roughly 21 percent of residential photovoltaic soft costs in one National Renewable Energy Laboratory analysis. In other words, a substantial share of what consumers pay does not purchase panels, batteries, wiring, or installation labor. It pays for the competitive machinery required to find, persuade, finance, and close individual customers.

A publicly coordinated program could reduce much of that duplication.

Meanwhile, renewable projects face an electrical grid built around an older, centralized energy system. At the end of 2025, approximately 8,200 projects representing more than 1,300 gigawatts of potential generation and nearly 750 gigawatts of storage were waiting in interconnection queues. Projects completed in 2025 had spent a median of more than five years moving from interconnection request to commercial operation.

That is not a shortage of renewable proposals. It is an institutional bottleneck.

America has projects. America has technology. America has investors. America has workers. But the system cannot connect them efficiently because the grid, regulations, cost-allocation rules, and utility structures developed around incumbent interests.

The fossil-fuel economy also hides its true price.

The price at the gas pump does not include the full cost of asthma, cardiovascular disease, premature death, climate-driven disasters, contaminated water, damaged ecosystems, military protection of energy routes, or public spending required to repair communities after extreme weather.

Economists call these externalities. Ordinary people should call them unpaid corporate bills.

The Environmental Protection Agency identifies fossil-fuel power plants as leading sources of air, water, and land pollution affecting communities nationwide. The International Monetary Fund explains that fossil fuels remain radically underpriced when their climate, health, congestion, accident, and infrastructure damages are included. It estimated global implicit fossil-fuel subsidies—costs not reflected in market prices—at $6.7 trillion in 2024.

So when oil and gas advocates claim fossil fuels are cheaper, they are playing an accounting trick. They place the private revenue on the corporation’s balance sheet and dump the illness, pollution, and climate damage onto the public.

That is not an efficient market. It is legalized cost shifting.

The oil industry also understood the climate threat long before many of its public statements acknowledged it. Researchers reviewing ExxonMobil’s internal projections found that most accurately forecast subsequent global warming. The industry did not simply lack information. Powerful interests had incentives to protect profitable assets and delay a transition that threatened their control over energy production.

That distinction matters.

The argument is not that every businessperson wakes up plotting to destroy the planet. The argument is structural. Corporate managers must protect revenue, market share, asset values, and shareholder returns. If a cleaner technology threatens existing investments, the incumbent company has a financial incentive to delay, discredit, capture, or control that technology.

Capitalism does not ask, “What energy system produces the greatest public good?”

It asks, “What energy system protects and expands capital?”

Healthcare exposes the con even more brutally.

Health insurance does not manufacture insulin. It does not perform surgery. It does not diagnose cancer. It does not set a broken bone, comfort a dying patient, invent a vaccine, or clean a hospital room.

Insurance primarily collects money, manages financial risk, constructs networks, processes claims, negotiates prices, and decides whether it will pay.

Those functions require administration, but they do not justify inserting profit-seeking gatekeepers between patients and care.

The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024—$15,474 for every person in the country and 18 percent of the entire economy. Private health insurance accounted for about $1.64 trillion of that spending. Yet Americans still face deductibles, copayments, narrow networks, prior authorization, medical debt, coverage losses, and denied claims.

What exactly are Americans buying?

In HealthCare.gov plans, insurers denied roughly one-fifth of in-network claims in 2023. Denial rates varied dramatically among companies. Some denials result from errors, incomplete documentation, duplicate submissions, or services outside coverage rules. But the business incentive remains unavoidable: every premium dollar not paid for medical care can support administration, reserves, executive compensation, or profit.

The seller of insurance benefits financially when the buyer does not receive the product’s promised payment.

That is an inherent conflict of interest.

Medicare Advantage provides an especially revealing comparison. Traditional Medicare is public insurance. Medicare Advantage sends public money to private insurers to manage Medicare benefits.

The private plans advertise dental benefits, gym memberships, vision coverage, and low premiums. But taxpayers frequently pay more for beneficiaries enrolled in these private plans than Medicare would spend covering comparable patients directly.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates that Medicare will spend approximately 14 percent more on Medicare Advantage enrollees in 2026—about $76 billion more—than it would have spent if those beneficiaries remained in traditional Medicare. MedPAC attributes much of the difference to favorable selection and more intensive diagnostic coding that increases payments.

Americans pay an extra private-insurance toll and then allow those insurers to restrict care.

The Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found that 13 percent of sampled Medicare Advantage prior-authorization denials met Medicare’s own coverage rules. The requested services likely would have been approved under traditional Medicare.

A newer inspector-general review found that Medicare Advantage insurers overturned 95 percent of appealed denials for skilled-nursing-facility admissions.

Think about what that means.

The patient needs rehabilitation or skilled nursing after hospitalization. The insurer denies the request. Only some families know how to appeal. Only some have the time, health, knowledge, and persistence to fight. Among the denials that were challenged, nearly all were reversed.

The bureaucracy itself becomes a rationing mechanism.

Traditional Medicare certainly needs improvements. It lacks a comprehensive out-of-pocket cap, and many beneficiaries need supplemental coverage. But paying medical bills does not require Wall Street innovation. America does not need competing corporations with separate executives, advertising departments, claims systems, provider networks, utilization-management divisions, profit requirements, and armies of people fighting one another over invoices.

That is not medical care. That is a tollbooth industry.

Prescription drugs complete the picture.

Private pharmaceutical companies conduct essential research, clinical trials, regulatory work, manufacturing, and distribution. Those contributions are real. But the popular story that private capital independently invents medicines while government merely watches is false.

Public investment builds much of the scientific foundation.

A study of drugs approved between 2010 and 2016 found that National Institutes of Health funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs examined. A later analysis found NIH-supported research associated with 354 of 356 drugs approved between 2010 and 2019, involving approximately $187 billion in public funding.

Taxpayers finance universities, laboratories, basic science, research grants, workforce training, and often the early investigation of biological targets. Then private companies obtain patents, control production, establish prices, and sell the finished products back to the same public that helped finance the underlying science.

The public absorbs much of the early risk. Private capital captures the monopoly reward.

Again, the issue is not that pharmaceutical companies contribute nothing. The issue is who pays, who controls, and who benefits.

A rational system would attach public conditions to public investment. When taxpayers finance the science, they should receive affordable access, transparent development costs, reasonable licensing terms, and protection against monopoly pricing.

Instead, the American system socializes risk and privatizes reward.

That pattern repeats everywhere.

The public funds roads; delivery corporations profit from them.

The public educates workers; employers capture their productivity.

The public finances medical science; drug companies patent the results.

The public insures banks against collapse; executives retain the upside.

The public absorbs pollution; fossil-fuel companies retain the revenue.

The public pays private Medicare plans more than traditional Medicare would cost; insurers still delay or deny care.

This is the grand economic con.

Americans have been trained to believe that capitalism equals markets, commerce, entrepreneurship, innovation, or personal freedom. Those things can exist without allowing private capital to dominate every social decision.

Markets can help distribute many ordinary goods. Small businesses can serve communities. Entrepreneurs can create valuable products. Cooperatives can compete. Public agencies can contract with private firms where appropriate.

But markets are tools, not gods.

Healthcare, energy, infrastructure, scientific research, housing, education, and environmental survival cannot depend exclusively on whether investors can maximize extraction.

The correct economic question is not merely, “Will this project make money?”

The correct questions are: Does society need it? Do the people and resources exist to accomplish it? Will it improve human life? Will it protect the planet? Can society organize the work democratically and efficiently?

When the answer is yes, society should proceed.

Government can directly employ workers. Public banks can finance long-term projects. Municipal utilities can produce energy. Cooperatives can let workers and consumers own productive enterprises. A strengthened public Medicare system can pay providers without a private insurer taking a cut. Publicly funded medicines can carry affordability requirements. Carbon prices and pollution rules can force corporations to pay costs they currently dump on everyone else.

None of this eliminates private enterprise. It simply ends private capital’s veto over public progress.

America is not poor. It is constrained.

It has workers who want jobs, patients who need care, roofs that can generate power, scientists who can develop medicines, and communities that need rebuilding. The nation possesses extraordinary productive capacity.

What it lacks is an economic system designed to convert that capacity into universal well-being.

The fraud is not that America cannot afford to solve its problems.

The fraud is that Americans have been taught they must wait until somebody becomes rich enough from the solution.

Human beings created the economy. The economy did not create human beings.

And when an economic system repeatedly blocks necessary work, preserves preventable suffering, rewards pollution, and places private extraction above public survival, society has every right—and every obligation—to redesign it.

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