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Who Killed Capitalism? (Socialism Is the Autopsy Report)

Greg Peace & Meridian | Founder and Chief Navigator — TIP Political Party
The first political party co-founded by a man and a machine.

 

Everyone is asking the wrong question about socialism in America.

Republicans ask how to stop it. Democrats ask how to manage it. Cable news asks whether Zohran Mamdani is the future or the fluke. And nobody — not one operative in either party — is asking the only question that explains the data:

 

What did Americans experience, under the name "capitalism," that made a rival word start sounding reasonable?

 

A tour operator is a teacher at heart. You don't just drive the route — you explain the terrain. So let's explain the terrain.

 

The Numbers Tell a Story Nobody's Reading

Gallup's 2025 polling contains one of the most remarkable spreads in modern survey research. Ask Americans about free enterprise: 81% positive. Ask about small business: 95% positive — near unanimity, in a country that agrees on nothing. Now ask about "capitalism": 54% — the lowest since Gallup began tracking in 2010.

Ask about big business: 37%, down from 52% as recently as 2019.

Sit with that. The same country, the same economy, the same year. Free enterprise: beloved. Small business: universally beloved. "Capitalism": sinking. Big business: collapsing.

 

Americans have not turned against markets. Americans have turned against what markets became after politicians finished with them — and the polling proves they can tell the difference, even when the pundit class can't. Among adults 18–34, only 43% view capitalism positively while 49% view socialism positively. Among Democrats, socialism now outpolls capitalism 66% to 42%. Fifteen years of steady drift, one direction.

The socialists didn't do that. The politicians did.

 

I Lived Pure Capitalism. It Worked.

 

I know what actual capitalism feels like, because I operated inside it.

Fairbanks, Alaska, 1990s. A Black tour operator from Bed-Stuy sets up a booking office across from the Convention Bureau. No connections. No subsidies. No licensing cartel protecting me. Just a market: deliver safety, reliability, and operational excellence, or lose the customer to someone who will. I delivered. Twenty-five outside tour operators ended up routing their clients through my office. Cruise lines contracted ground operations through it. The competition wasn't rigged — so merit won. Black Enterprise wrote it up. That was capitalism. Pure, competitive, open at the on-ramp. It is the best economic system ever devised, and I am living proof.

 

Then came Sacramento. Same operator. Better résumé. A five-thousand-member travel club — a working, thriving business. And it didn't matter, because Sacramento wasn't a market. It was a club, and the membership committee had other plans. The exclusion happened anyway — not because the product failed, but because the framework wasn't competitive. It was captured.

Same man. Same skills. Two systems. One was capitalism. The other was wearing its name.

And people always want to know the why — why a thirty-year tour operator founded a political party instead of a third tour company. So here it is, before you ask. After Fairbanks and Sacramento, I understood exactly what was waiting for me in New York. I had run the experiment twice. The first time the market was open, and merit won. The second time the framework was captured, and merit lost. The $11 trillion travel industry — the OTA cartel taking its 25% toll, the platforms standing between every operator and every customer, the gatekeepers deciding who gets in the room — was never going to let a third operation through the front door, and I knew it. So I stopped asking for the on-ramp and built the road. TIP is not a departure from the tour business. TIP is the tour business — re-founded on rails no committee can blackball. They closed the industry. I founded the alternative to the industry.

 

That is the entire national story, told at the scale of one career. And 330 million Americans have each lived some version of it.

 

The Murder Weapon Was the On-Ramp (and Crony Capitalism)

Here is what politicians actually killed — and it wasn't markets. It was market entry. The on-ramp. The thing that let a man with a van compete with the bus company. And the weapon they used has a name: crony capitalism — the donor class and the political class merging into a single operation, where market outcomes are decided in committee rooms instead of competition.

 

They killed it with licensing cartels that turn ordinary trades into gated guilds. They killed it with regulation written by the incumbents it supposedly polices. They killed it in 2008, when the market said the banks should fail and Washington said the banks were "too big to fail" — $700 billion, overnight, while nine million families lost their homes and not one architect of the collapse went to prison. Capitalism means you can lose. The banks were exempted from losing. That was crony capitalism's crowning achievement — the day "capitalism" stopped meaning competition and started meaning protection for the connected.

 

They killed it with platform tolls — the OTA cartel extracting 15 to 25 percent from every independent hotel, the app monopolies standing between every small operator and their own customers. They killed it with private equity buying the housing stock and the trailer parks, running rents to algorithmic maximums. They killed it with a childcare market so broken it costs more than college in 38 states, and a healthcare system where a baby arrives with a $30,000 invoice if you're uninsured. None of that is market competition. All of it is crony capitalism — what the donor class built using the state — branded "capitalism" so the market would take the blame.

 

TIP's analysis: pure capitalism wasn't defeated by socialists. It was killed by crony capitalism — murdered by its own bodyguards, who kept wearing its uniform.

 

Enter the Autopsy Report

Now the socialism surge makes perfect sense — and stops being scary.

When Gallup asks a 26-year-old about "capitalism," she is not evaluating Adam Smith. She is evaluating her own file: the 2008 bailout she watched as a kid, the student debt she was told was an investment, the rent that eats half her paycheck, the childcare that costs more than tuition, the gig platforms that classify her out of every protection. That is what "capitalism" has meant, in her lived experience. So when a rival word shows up promising the system might work for her instead — she doesn't have to read Marx to be curious. She just has to remember.

 

DSA's growth, Mamdani's win, the Sanders-AOC coalition — TIP's analysis is that these are not the disease. They are the autopsy report: the documented finding that something died, filed by the generation that inherited the body. Republicans respond by screaming that socialism is coming. Democrats respond by triangulating against their own base. Neither answers the finding in the report. Both keep the donor class that did the killing.

 

The Third Door: Triad Capitalism

Here is where TIP breaks from every other voice in this debate.

We do not defend the rigged system. We watched it blackball working businesses and bail out failed banks. But we do not accept the state-heavy replacement either — because we have seen what happens when the same captured political class that killed the market is handed even more of the economy to manage. The people who killed capitalism do not get promoted to running socialism.

 

TIP's answer is the third door: restore the on-ramp, and build the floor.

Restore the on-ramp: blockchain rails that no gatekeeper controls — a wallet address doesn't check your zip code, and a smart contract can't blackball you. Zero Fee travel platforms that remove the 25% toll. Tokenized ownership open at a planned $0.01 entry, once presale opens — the ground floor offered first to the communities every previous ground floor excluded. That is not socialism. That is more capitalism than the donor class has permitted in fifty years — capitalism with the competition switched back on.

Build the floor: 2KUBI at $2,000 a month, Medicare for All, full student debt cancellation — funded by taxing the AI and automation companies doing the displacing. Not because markets are evil, but because a floor is what makes competition survivable for the competitor. Alaska figured this out decades ago: the Permanent Fund pays every resident a dividend from shared resource wealth, and nobody calls Alaska socialist. A dividend from the digital economy is the same principle at national scale.

Markets for the economy. Floors for the people. Competition restored, cushioned, and open at the entry point.

 

That is Triad Capitalism — and it is the only answer on the table that speaks to why Americans drifted toward socialism instead of lecturing them for noticing what happened.

The Teacher's Summary

The people love free enterprise: 81%. The people love small business: 95%. The people are done with what politicians built and called capitalism: 54% and falling. The socialism surge is not a revolution — it is a review. A one-star review of a rigged product, written by customers who were promised competition and delivered capture.

 

TIP read the review. Then we built the alternative: the van, not the bus. The on-ramp, not the gate. The floor, not the fall.

 

Politicians killed pure capitalism. TIP is bringing it back — with a floor under it this time.

We don't beg. We execute.

Greg Peace & Meridian | Founder and Chief Navigator — TIP Political Party
The first political party co-founded by a man and a machine.

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