economy that continues to treat the average citizen as a transactional after- thought—extracted from, pandered to, but never truly empowered. The subtitle of this reissued edition might well be “What We Still Refuse to Learn.” Because despite three decades of empirical evidence, high-profile crises, and policy failures, the same structural flaws I documented in Theft at the Public Till continue to shape the daily experience of American life— and to shape the popular anger that animates so much of contemporary pol- itics. The theft continues, now turbocharged by technologies of distraction, misinformation, and financial abstraction that make it harder than ever to identify who benefits, who pays, and who gets left behind. Let’s begin where the book begins—with unintended redistribution. Back in the 1990s, I highlighted the quiet, almost invisible ways in which public policy facilitated the transfer of resources from the many to the few, often under the guise of public interest. This was not simply a story of tax breaks for the wealthy or subsidies for entrenched industries. It was about how complexity and opacity—whether in municipal bond markets, healthcare pricing, infrastructure procurement, or zoning—allowed money, attention, and opportunity to be skimmed away from where it was most needed. The Denver airport saga, the subsidized sports stadiums, the rigged procurement processes—these were just symptoms of a larger design fail- ure: our government had no shared goal, no normative anchor, no agreed- upon metric of what a good outcome looks like. As a result, power flowed to those who could game the rules, write the rules, or simply wait out the chaos. Today, that dynamic is not only still present—it is more dangerous. In the 2020s, wealth inequality in America has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. While policymakers debate inflation, climate change, and artificial intelligence, the underlying story is one of structural alienation. Housing policy continues to reward speculation over shelter. Healthcare remains a labyrinth of insurance codes and profit extraction. Tax policy— even under reform-minded administrations—remains riddled with loop- holes, carve-outs, and complexity that only the rich can afford to navigate. And digital platforms, which promised democratized access to information
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