#but OP was a proponent of forced reeducation so yeah I'm not platforming that weirdo

[dogsuffrage]

Capitalism created the middle class as business leaders responded to the rise of socialism in the early 1900s by restructuring to elevate a certain subset of the population to a point of comfort just high enough to dissuade them from revolution and leaving a shrunken lower class that could not fight on their own. This is not a conspiracy, pro-business organizations existed with this as their explicit goal. Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson all prioritized labor reform with the explicit purpose of weakening the rise of socialism in the U.S. to protect long-term business interests. Teddy Roosevelt in particular was explicit in how he viewed corporate interests as his number 1 priority and desperately tried to get socialists arrested. Capitalists created the middle class because the alternative was the destruction of capitalism, they had simply pushed people too far. The preservation of it is essential to capitalism's continued existence in this country, but short-sighted capitalists continue to shrink the middle class because they are, quite frankly, just dumb and greedy for short-term profit. The destruction of the middle class is a flaw in the capitalist system as we continuously move more and more to a capitalism that only cares about quarterly gains and not long term profitability. The only outcomes of this are the continuation of socialist revolutionary intent or the strengthening of the middle class again.