Why So Many People Are Struggling – And it Was Never Their Fault | The Hidden Mechanics of an Economy That Works Against Normal Life

A Note from Adam

I haven’t written this because I’ve only just begun to understand these problems. I’m doing so because explaining them has never been easy. Even many academics and economists are so committed to the system we have that they simply cannot see another way. It has always been easier for them to believe that those who are struggling brought it on themselves than to confront the alternative – that the system they defend may feel stable for those who benefit from it, but it is not fair, and it is not how things should be.

The reason for writing this now is simple: people everywhere can feel that things no longer add up. There is a shared concern about what happens next, and we will all face difficult choices in the years ahead. Those choices become harder – and the times become more confusing – if we still don’t understand what is happening or what has caused so many of the problems we now need to move beyond and leave behind.

This essay is an attempt to make that understanding easier. Not to assign blame, not to provoke anger, but to give people a clearer picture of the forces shaping their lives. If we can see the system for what it is, we can begin to imagine something better.

1. The world people think they live in

Money sits at the heart of everything. Every decision, every direction, every journey, every relationship we have today relates to money in some way and at some level, to the point that we don’t even see it or consciously think about it being there anymore.

We think about money in simple terms: as a store of value, and more significantly as the measurement of value for everything we do, need, own and imagine for the future – because that’s the way money works; right?

To many of us, money is real, quantifiable and tangible. It’s like the coins and notes we sometimes still use, and we assume the digital version-the figures on a bank statement, the numbers that move when we tap a card-is just the same thing in another form. We build our lives, our hopes, our sense of security on that assumption.

We are also quietly told a story: that if we work hard, manage our money, avoid “bad choices”, the system will look after us. That wages are fair, that prices are natural, that debt is a personal failing, that the economy is something that happens “out there” while we get on with our lives.

This is the world people believe they inhabit. Familiar. Rational. Moral. And it’s the world that allows the real system to operate without being seen.

2. The first crack in the illusion

What we don’t think about-or in many cases don’t realise-is that the relationship and understanding of money we have is not the same for everyone, and that the way we interact, use, value and respect money makes us vulnerable to its influence, power and presence.

Historically, there was a time when banking really did look like the story we still tell ourselves: deposits, lending, interest, savings. But in the 20th century, something fundamental changed. We moved away from a system where the money in circulation had to relate directly to the amount of gold held-the gold standard-and into a system called fiat, where money is created at will.

Fiat simply means: “let it be so”. Money exists because the system declares it exists.

Today, every pound enters the economy as someone’s debt. Money is not a pile of coins waiting to be lent out; it is a number typed into existence when a loan is made, a bond is issued, or a government borrows.

Yes, you heard that correctly – money today is actually debt.

Most people never realise this. Not because they are foolish, but because nobody ever told them.

While they were living their lives, trusting the system, the system was quietly reshaping the world around them using a logic they were never allowed to see.

The first crack in the illusion appears when you ask simple questions:

If every country is in debt, who is the creditor?
If banks lend money they don’t already have, what exactly are we borrowing?
If money can be created from nothing, why is anyone going without?

Once you see that money is created as debt, you can no longer pretend the system is neutral.

3. The reveal: how the system actually works

Modern money is not mined, earned, or discovered. It is created-conjured into existence through government borrowing, bank lending, and central‑bank intervention.

Every pound enters the economy as someone’s debt; every debt becomes someone else’s asset.

In plain language:

Fiat money: Money that exists because the system says it does, not because it is backed by anything physical.
Credit creation: When a bank types new numbers into your account and calls it a loan. The money did not exist before that moment.
Debt as money: The numbers we call “money” in the system are, in reality, records of who owes what to whom.
Interest: The extra amount that must be paid back on top of the loan. This is not created with the loan; it must be extracted from somewhere else in the real economy.

Every loan requires:

principal
interest
fees

None of that interest is created with the original money. It has to come from someone’s labour, someone’s time, someone’s sacrifice.

So the system works like this:

Money is created as debt. Debt must be repaid with interest. Interest must be taken from the real economy.

The more money is created, the more extraction is required.

This is why:

wages stagnate
public services collapse
housing becomes unaffordable
debt becomes permanent
inequality skyrockets

People are not suffering because the system is broken. They are suffering because the system is working exactly as it should.

4. The consequence: how money creation bought the real world

Before money, people traded directly: food, labour, tools, shelter. Value was agreed in the moment, between people who could see each other and the reality of what they were exchanging.

There were always those who abused power-leaders, warriors, officials who took more than they needed-but they were limited by what physically existed.

Fiat money and credit creation removed that limit.

Money created from nothing has been used to buy everything real.

Banks, asset managers, private‑equity firms, and multinational corporations have used newly created credit to acquire:

public infrastructure
utilities
housing stock
farmland
logistics networks
media companies
technology platforms
entire industries

These purchases were not funded by savings or productive profit. They were funded by credit creation-money that did not exist until the moment it was lent.

Massive swathes of public infrastructure, private property, businesses, and capital ownership have been transferred into private hands not because those buyers had earned the wealth, but because the system gave them access to unreal money with real purchasing power.

Ordinary people, earning wages, paying bills, could never compete with that.

This is why:

housing became an investment class instead of a human necessity
private equity owns half the high street
utilities and transport were sold off and now charge the public for access to what was once collectively owned
monopolies exploded, and “markets” quietly turned into systems of rent‑seeking

At the same time, people at the bottom of this system are told that the minimum wage is enough to live on.

It isn’t.

A wage that cannot cover rent, food, transport, heating, clothing, and basic security is not a living wage; it is a survival wage.

Survival for those on the minimum wage is only possible through:

benefits
charity
debt

No amount of budgeting can fix a wage that was never designed to cover the cost of living. Yet those who struggle are treated as if they are responsible for the plight they are in-told to “manage better”, “work more”, “stop wasting money”-while the system quietly ensures that their struggle continues.

The hardship is manufactured. The shame is manufactured. The dependence is manufactured.

And now, the same mechanism is inflating the AI bubble.

Vast flows of credit are pouring into AI companies whose current productivity and wage‑earning capacity cannot justify their valuations.

The system is funding the very technology that threatens to remove jobs, reduce wages, and undermine the income streams required to service the debt that created the bubble in the first place.

It is the snake eating its own tail: a debt‑based system financing tools that erode the labour base that keeps that system alive.

This is why some of the loudest voices in technology have suddenly begun talking about “AI takeover”, “existential risk”, and “superintelligence”. These narratives function as brakes-attempts to slow down a bubble that could become the straw that breaks the system’s back, if something else doesn’t get there first.

5. The betrayal: people were told this was “responsible economics”

None of this was sold to the public as extraction. It was sold as responsibility.

People were told:

austerity is necessary
inflation is accidental
debt is dangerous (for them)
privatisation is efficient
markets are natural
minimum wage is enough
benefits are a safety net, not a dependency trap

They were told that if they struggled, it was because they had failed-failed to work hard enough, failed to manage money, failed to be “responsible”.

In reality:

debt enriches creditors
inflation enriches asset holders
austerity protects the financial system
credit creation fuels monopolies
monopolies extract from the public
low wages and high costs create permanent dependence on benefits, charity, or debt

People weren’t stupid. They were never shown how the system works. They were never told that money is created as debt, that interest requires extraction, that asset bubbles are funded by credit, that their wages are structurally insufficient by design.

They paid the price for that ignorance in stress, in hardship, in lost opportunities, in lives shortened by deprivation-while others played a game with the system that enriched them far beyond anything they could ever need.

The system creates the struggle. Then it blames the struggling.

That is the betrayal.

6. The moral truth: legalised criminality

Calling this “legalised criminality” is not hyperbole. It is a description of the gap between legality and morality.

The system is legal because the law was written to protect it. The system is criminal in the human sense because it produces harm as a function of its design.

It has cost lives. It has denied peace of mind to millions. It has pushed people into debt, into hunger, into cold homes, into permanent anxiety, simply so that those playing a game with the system can make more and have more than they will ever need themselves.

Many of those who have picked up the intergenerational baton of financial control may not have been fully cognisant of the real‑world consequences of what they were doing. They may have believed the narratives of stability, responsibility, inevitability.

But ignorance is no excuse.

Power comes with responsibility. Paradigm blindness is no longer any kind of excuse when the consequences are fast becoming clear for all to see.

When belief sustains harm, and harm sustains wealth, legitimacy becomes a weapon.

People are suffering not because the system malfunctioned, but because it is functioning exactly as designed: to transfer wealth upward, to protect those who benefit, and to keep those who pay the price believing it is all somehow their fault.

7. The final question: can a system built on harm serve the public good?

The modern financial system is not a neutral tool. It is not a passive framework. It is not a natural evolution.

It is a mechanism-engineered, refined, and defended-that transfers wealth upward under the guise of legitimacy.

Its power comes from belief. Its consequences are real. Its impact is visible everywhere: in debt, in inequality, in collapsing services, in rising hardship, and in the ownership of the physical world.

People have been duped into thinking this is stability. But stability for the system has meant instability for everyone else.

So the question is no longer whether the system is moral.

The question is whether a system built on belief, extraction, and harm can ever truly serve the public good-and if not, what we are prepared to do once we finally see it for what it is.

A Reflection

It would have been very easy to write something that simply tears the economy apart, lists everything that is wrong, and leaves people with nothing but frustration – as too many still do. But that has never been my purpose. I am a solutions person. I believe in something better for everyone, and I have believed that for a long time.

I’ve been on the wrong end of the system myself, and my time as a councillor and local government officer brought me face to face with the cold, hard reality that the “legitimacy” of the system has carried enormous weight. It has taken many otherwise intelligent and caring people with it, convincing them that the harm it causes is somehow necessary, deserved, or is simply unavoidable.

I don’t agree.

The turbulence we are beginning to experience – and the uncertainty of what lies ahead – may offer humanity an opportunity for change of a kind it has never had before. That is why I have spent years developing structures and systems like the Basic Living Standard and the Local Economy and Governance System: practical foundations for a people‑first system rather than a money‑first one. These ideas are not abstract theories; they are workable designs for a fairer future.

I hope readers will take time to explore the work I have published, and I will always be happy to answer any questions I can. Understanding what has gone wrong is only the first step. What matters most is what we choose to build next.

Why So Many People Are Struggling Download

The welfare budget is out of control. But many claimants are there through no fault of their own and slashing payments won’t address the poverty problem or help out-of-their-depth politicians either

The coming weeks are likely to be a bleak time, not only for those on benefits who receive payments that could be cut. But also for growing numbers of the low paid, whose employment is likely to be at risk because of national insurance changes and yes – the April rise in the National Minimum Wage.

Appropriate credit should of course be given where it is due and the Labour Government certainly do appear to be digging themselves further and further into a hole with every policy decision that they make.

However, nothing is as straightforward as it looks in politics. And as I wrote in a blog in early December when I asked if Labour has been set up as ‘custodians of the collapse’, there is much to suggest that when it comes to the quality of politicians that we currently have in the UK today, the group filling the government benches are the unfortunate ones who have been left to carry the can.

I say this, as the collapse that there is very good reason to believe the collapse that is now underway, could, in theory have began at any time, since the decision to bail out the banks during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/08.

The chances that a collapse would arrive sooner and more severely has grown significantly as a result of the Government response to the Covid Pandemic, the War in Ukraine, and basically everything that the politicians in power have been printing money to cover the cost of, ever since.

A collapse is and has always been inevitable. Because the financial, economic or monetary system that we have had since 1971 is to all intents and purposes little more than a massive game or perhaps what we might call man’s greatest confidence trick.

The financial, monetary and economic system that we currently have was put together, successfully implemented (adopted) and pushed so that those ‘in the tent’ would become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Meanwhile, control of the greater population has slowly but surely been passed to the same set of interests, using all manner of manipulation and incentives that mean people have effectively been surrendering their freedom – usually through financial means.

Hard as the reality may be to swallow, many people have been unaware of what has been happening to them; how their approach to life, relationships and everything has changed and in real terms, what a small set of very selfish and self-serving interests have so-far successfully done to everyone else, just so that they could become very rich.

The big flaw in ‘the game’ and with it the source of the greatest risk – which is the loss of control when that flaw inevitably becomes too obvious to hide, is the only way that money can be created or printed in the increasing amounts that it has been and still is, is for the value of the money that normal people possess or are able to earn to lessen much quicker than wage rises or the value of property they have the ability to own to rise and offset it. Let alone go beyond in the wealth creating sense that any does who is part of the clique who ‘rigged the game’.

By now, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with welfare, benefits or the National Minimum Wage.

The National Minimum Wage, which was conveniently brought into being by the Blairite Labour Government on 1 April 1999, was of course sold to us all as a tool to ensure that everyone received a fair wage for every hour worked.

And as far as that story was sold, the people who the establishment needed to believe what was being suggested, almost certainly did and have done ever since, not least of all as the National Minimum Wage has increasingly become known as the National Living Wage too.

The problem is that even at the rate of £12.21 which will be the hourly rate of the National Minimum Wage from this coming April, it is and will continue to be nowhere near enough for any single person to live independently, self-sufficiently and without the help of benefits, charity (like Foodbanks), by going into debt or raiding savings – or falling back on them all.

The National Minimum Wage is certainly nowhere near enough for anyone to live on!

Done properly and with the intentions that should have underpinned its implementation, the National Minimum Wage could have performed and impacted lives very differently to the way that it has.

However, what it has actually done has been to serve as a wage suppressant. Keeping the wage ceiling deliberately low for significant numbers of people within a system that has been funnelling money in one direction only.

Let’s be clear. Not having the guarantee of taking home enough to ‘pay their own way’ makes it near impossible for people to feel in control of their own lives.

However, the legal requirement to pay the National Minimum Wage itself has the perverse consequence of ensuring that small businesses can no longer succeed. Because the margins that big global businesses are working to have made it impossible to keep paying the same number of people they could previously afford to.

Meanwhile, those big businesses themselves could actually afford to pay what it costs their lowest paid employees to live, but too often don’t. Instead choosing to move everything that they possibly can to countries where they can pay exactly what they want to, whilst everything we need is quickly becoming a luxury that more of us can no longer afford.

Guaranteeing that everyone on the minimum wage earns enough to live without help would solve problems that many simply wouldn’t believe

In my recent Paper ‘Is Poverty Invisible to those who don’t Experience it’, I talked about the experience of being on benefits today. What that actually means to those unfortunate enough to find themselves claiming them, and what it is like for normal, decent people to step through a door where only the most resilient could ever maintain the levels of confidence and self-surety needed to navigate a system where anyone who cannot fend for themselves financially is treated like a pariah, at each and every turn.

To put it bluntly, most people who find themselves within the benefits system today, without a career background or experience that makes them employable in a way that almost certainly guarantees they would never be there anyway, are damned. They are unable to escape, because the most basic of jobs that are readily available do not offer an income level that is genuinely realistic enough to provide anyone with the kind of independence and freedom that only a genuine wage that links directly to what it costs to live can afford them.

For those who need it to be spelled out; the number of people who are on benefits because they want to be there or because they cannot function in any way without benefits is very small and much smaller than any of the statistical evidence that is available would suggest.

However, working a ridiculous number of hours per week, to only then have to rely upon benefit top ups and the bewildering experience that goes with it; to struggle enough that you have to ‘qualify’ for an emergency food package from a Foodbank or to have to go into debt or use money that was put aside for living rather than to simply stay alive, holds no great incentive for anyone. Especially when the work itself usually attracts scorn and ridicule from others who see themselves as better and look down on those they see as beneath them or without the same value.

Solving the benefits problem should be as simple as government telling every employer that they have to pay everyone whatever it costs to live.

Yet we have long since passed the time when this would have been possible without collapsing the economy. Even if it would only have made a difference for a short period of time.

People are on benefits and living with less than what anyone needs to live, in this day and age, because for many of them it really is the lesser of the evils. Even though the evils that they are being subjected to still hurt and reach very deeply indeed.

The Government ‘view’

At the other end of the problem, the growing welfare bill is fast approaching a cost that simple mathematics has long since told us that the UK can no longer afford.

However, politicians have continued to do ‘find’ or create the money to keep covering the welfare bill (even though they talk up the mean actions that they do take), as the political fall out from exposing the truth, that there is a significant and growing underclass of people whose incomes are nowhere near what it actually costs to live and that businesses of ALL sizes are effectively having wages subsidised by the state, whilst vested interests are pretty much taking every bit of available wealth from everyone, would mean a confrontation and battle with the system itself that only a very rare breed of politician would be big enough to tackle.

The cost for everyone is the society and culture we were once proud of now crumbling around us, having its destruction accelerated by those in power who have become so desperate that they are turning everything to ash, just so that they can be seen to remain in control.

The reality is that politicians no longer have enough legitimate or morally workable options available to them to justify creating enough money out of thin air to save them now or to ensure their re-election, when the UK has for a long time already been technically broke.

What so few can or are prepared to either accept or to see, is that money doesn’t work for people in the system that we have and never did. Even though generations have regularly been conditioned to believe that getting wealthy or having everything would come quickly to all of us on the cheap. Just as long as we all went along with the lie.

The UK is now caught within a whirlwind of parallel death spirals. Where the poor and those with less can only become even poorer. Whilst the ability of government to do anything meaningful has been hollowed out.

The situation leaves the entire political class on the edge of a precipice where government is about to become unable to do anything. And all of this has been inflicted upon us so that a few could become wealthy and obtain power, always knowing that they would have to achieve oppressive levels of control over society, before anyone who would be brave enough to speak out and be believed by enough people had worked it all out.