The Myth of the Self-Made Millionaire & The Rise of the Corporation

The Myth: The Hidden Public Platform

We often hear the argument that wealthy people are the “job creators,” and that taxing them hurts everyone else. It’s the moral cornerstone of trickle-down economics: their success is our success, and their wealth is a sign of virtue. We’re told they “built that,” and thus owe nothing to society.

Having run a small business, I’ve learned this is a fantasy and a dangerous fiction. The truth is the opposite: the wealthy rely on the government, and by extension, on all of us, far more than the middle class or the poor. Their fortunes are not built in a vacuum. They are harvested from a field we all plowed, planted, and watered together. That’s precisely why they have the greatest responsibility to reinvest in the soil.

This myth is a poison in our politics and our community spirit. It justifies inequality, erodes our sense of shared destiny, and corrodes the reciprocal obligations that make a society function. It denies the fundamental truth that all individual pursuit of happiness depends on a massive, shared, publicly-built foundation.

The Hidden Subsidy of Wealth: The Invisible Platform

We call these things “public goods,” but let’s be blunt: they are wealth multipliers. They are the infrastructure that turns a good idea into a global fortune, a garage startup into a household name.

Think about any modern fortune. Jeff Bezos’s empire depends on a web of public investments he didn’t build. Packages from China move on seas protected by the U.S. Navy. They travel on highways built and maintained by taxpayers. They are delivered to doors in neighborhoods kept safe by police and fire departments, via an addressing system created by the postal service. Bezos's contracts are enforced by public courts. His entire online marketplace depends on the internet, a technology born from government research and defense spending.

The internet’s foundational technologies such as ARPANET and the World Wide Web, were funded by U.S. taxpayers through DARPA, the NSF, and CERN. Private enterprise commercialized what the public pioneered.

Bezos and his fellow billionaires aren’t standing alone on a mountaintop of their own making. They’re standing on a massive, publicly-funded platform. And the myth of the “self-made” individual encourages them, and us, to pretend that platform isn’t there, so they can justify pulling the ladder up after themselves.

Let’s itemize the public platform every fortune rests upon: The Public Works of Commerce: Roads, bridges, ports, the electric grid, the air traffic system, satellites for GPS. The U.S. highway system alone was built at a public cost of over $500 billion (in today’s dollars) and enabled an estimated 11 billion tons of freight in 2024.

The Rule of Law: The entire concept of enforceable contracts, stable currency, protected property rights, and patent law is a government service. Without it, there is no “Fortune 500,” only chaos and force.

The Educated Workforce: Every employee is trained by a public K-12 system. Every breakthrough in tech, medicine, or engineering rests on basic science from public universities and government grants. Roughly 73% of all science papers cited on the front page of U.S. industry patents had origins in publicly funded research.

The Innovations They Inherit: The internet, GPS, touchscreens, and countless medical advances were seeded by government grants and military research. The private sector brilliantly refined and monetized what the public sector pioneered and de-risked.

The irony is breathtaking. Those who benefit most from this collective investment are often the loudest in denouncing “government” and their duty to sustain it. But strip away the public platform, and their fortunes, and our collective capacity for innovation and security, collapse.

Corporate Transformation: From Public Tool to Private Power

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.” – Thomas Jefferson

How did we get here? How did an entity meant to serve the public good become a power over it? The story of the corporation holds the answer.

The Public Tool (1700s - Early 1800s)

In the early days of New Hampshire and the republic, a corporation was nothing like today's multinational entity. It was a public franchise, created by a specific act of the state legislature for a narrow, public purpose.

A charter might authorize a company to build a bridge, dig a canal, or operate a mill. These charters came with strict limits: what the corporation could do, how long it could exist, what it could charge, and often, a requirement that it revert to public ownership after a set period. The logic was straightforward and grounded in the common good: a corporation drew its right to exist from the community, and therefore had to serve the community. It was a means to a public end, a tool for building a shared foundation of prosperity.

This concept was so ingrained that when the founders revolted against Britain, a corporate entity was one of their prime targets. In 1773, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax. It was also against a corporate bailout. The British government had granted the East India Company a monopoly on tea imports and a tax break, threatening to crush colonial merchants. The revolutionaries saw this clearly: a government using its power to enrich a connected corporation at the public's expense. Their pursuit of happiness required freedom from such unaccountable, profit-driven power.

The Legal Transformation: Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)

New Hampshire sits at the center of the pivotal moment when this public tool began to morph into a private power. In 1816, our state legislature tried to reorganize Dartmouth College, a private corporation. The college resisted, claiming its royal charter was a contract. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1819, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Court ruled in the college's favor. A corporate charter was a contract, protected by the Constitution, and could not be altered by the state. This decision was a seismic shift. It began the process of transforming the corporation from a public instrument into a private, autonomous entity with legal rights akin to an individual; rights without the commensurate responsibilities of citizenship.

Over the next century, through a series of court cases and laws, corporations gained more of these “personhood” rights. Yet, as legal scholar Justice John Paul Stevens later noted in his Citizens United dissent, they “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires” like real human beings. Their one overriding legal duty, as would soon be cemented, is to maximize shareholder profit. The purpose was narrowing from public benefit to private gain.

The Legal Lock-In: The Profit Mandate

A single courtroom battle in Michigan in 1919 would lock shareholder power into law and redefine the very purpose of the American corporation for the next century. It's the story of Henry Ford and his own shareholders, the Dodge brothers.

In 1914, Henry Ford's Model T was a smash hit. The Ford Motor Company was rolling in cash; Ford made a startling announcement. He would slash the price of the Model T yet again, and, most radically, he would more than double his workers' daily pay to the famous $5-a-day wage.

His reasoning was visionary. He argued that well-paid workers would become loyal customers, that reducing turnover would save costs, and that a prosperous working class was essential for a stable, growing economy. He famously said the company should make only a reasonable profit and that the rest belonged in some way to the public. He saw his corporation as part of a social ecosystem that enabled widespread economic benefits.

But two of his largest shareholders, John and Horace Dodge, were furious. They sued Ford, demanding he stop his expansion plans and distribute the massive profits as dividends.

The case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company (1919), reached the Michigan Supreme Court. The court's decision was a thunderclap that still echoes in every corporate boardroom today.

The court ruled against Henry Ford.

In its landmark opinion, the court declared:A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. 

Ford's desire to benefit his workers and the public was, in the eyes of the law, a dereliction of duty. The corporation, the court decreed, existed for one supreme purpose: to maximize shareholder value.

This was the final, legal severing of the corporation from any inherent public purpose. No longer a franchise granted for communal benefit, it was now a private financial vehicle. The “community” in its calculus was reduced to a cost center: wages to be minimized, taxes to be avoided, regulations to be resisted. This was all done in the service of that quarterly dividend. The legal mandate to contribute to a sustainable community was replaced by a mandate to extract value from them.

When Taxes Forced Investment

The 1950s is considered by many as the golden age of American prosperity. This was an era when a single income supported a family, when workers could expect steady pay raises, and the government invested in public infrastructure. But these investments that built the middle-class did not happen by accident. 

In this post World War II era, the top marginal corporate tax rate hovered around 52%. For every dollar of profit above a high threshold, more than fifty cents went to the federal government. This created a powerful, simple incentive: if you couldn’t keep the money, what was the smartest thing to do with it?

Corporations were faced with a choice: they could write a check to the U.S. Treasury, or they could reinvest that capital in ways that were deductible, deferred, or simply smarter for long-term growth. This tax code channeled success. It made spending on innovation, worker training, and higher wages the rational business decision.

Research & Development boomed, because investing in tomorrow's products was better than taxing today's profits.

Capital investment soared, as companies built new factories and upgraded equipment instead of surrendering earnings.

Wages rose, because putting money into the pockets of loyal, skilled workers through salaries, pensions, and benefits, built a more stable and productive company.

This was the hidden engine of mid-century prosperity. The high tax rate wasn't a penalty, it was a structural nudge. It told capital: If you want to retain value, you must create value for your community. Profits were recycled into the foundations of shared prosperity.

The contrast with today is stark. After decades of rate cuts, the corporate tax burden has plummeted. The incentive has flipped. Now, the most rational way to retain value is often to extract it. Corporations achieve this through stock buybacks, dividend payments, and financial engineering that boosts share price in the short term. The money that once flowed into factory floors and worker paychecks now flows to shareholder accounts, often untaxed at the corporate level and lightly taxed as capital gains.

We changed the question from “How do we build something lasting?” to “How do we extract value quickly?” The high tax rates of the 1950s didn't stifle the American economy; they disciplined it toward productive, long-term investment. They forced capital to build, not just harvest.

Community First Economics understands this lesson: tax policy is not just about raising revenue. It is a blueprint. It tells capital where to go. In the 1950s, the blueprint said: Invest here, in the real economy. We need a new blueprint that says the same thing.

The Pathology of Extraction: From Obsolescence to Consumerism

If Dodge v. Ford provided the legal command to prioritize profit above all, then the strategies of Planned Obsolescence became the practical execution of that command, directly attacking the ecological sustainability of capitalism.

The Phoebus Cartel (1924): The Blueprint for Failure

In 1924, the world’s leading light bulb manufacturers, including General Electric, Philips, and Osram, formed the Phoebus cartel. Their agreement created a universal standard: bulbs would last 1,000 hours.

Earlier bulbs could last 2,500 hours or more. The cartel’s engineers didn’t improve longevity, instead they chose to shorten it. Manufacturers whose bulbs exceeded the limit were fined. The cartel justified this standard in the language of efficiency, brightness, and compatibility; reasonable goals for a growing global market. But the result was the same: a dramatically shorter product life that turned light bulbs from durable goods into recurring purchases. The proof lies in the results of their collusion, not in their stated goal.

The now-famous Centennial Light Bulb in Livermore, California, burning since 1901, shows that much longer life was technically possible, even if dimmer or less efficient.

By standardizing obsolescence, Phoebus shifted power from the consumer who wanted a lasting product to the corporation that needed perpetual sales. It was a business model that wasn’t built on improving quality, but on ensuring its decline. This was a blueprint that would shape entire industries for the next century.

Manufacturing a Culture of Waste: The 1956 Plastics Conference

If Phoebus attacked product durability, the plastics industry of the 1950s set out to attack the public's mentality. In the post-war boom, chemical companies faced a problem: a massive surplus of production capacity from the war effort. Their solution, unveiled at the now-infamous 1956 National Plastics Conference, was to convince the public that throwing things away was modern and virtuous.

Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of Modern Packaging magazine, delivered the conference's keynote with chilling clarity. “The future of plastics is in the trash can,” he declared. He urged manufacturers to start seeing packaging as a single-use, instantly disposable sales tool. The explicit goal was to actively shift the public psyche from the ethic of reuse and thrift, the mindset that weathered the Depression and won the war, to one of convenience and waste.

This was a coordinated, industry-wide campaign. Single-serving packages, plastic bags, and disposable cups were marketed as liberating. When public concern about plastic waste grew in the 1960s, the industry pioneered blaming the consumer. The famous “Crying Indian” ads of the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign (funded by beverage and packaging companies) framed pollution as a problem of individual littering, not of systemic overproduction. Later, they championed recycling as a catch-all solution, despite knowing most plastics were never economically recyclable. Less than 9% of plastic produced is recycled in the U.S. today. The point of the recycling symbol was to pacify consumer guilt and stave off laws that would limit production. It made trash our moral failing when it should have been their engineering goal to design a sustainable product.

Consumerism as the New Civic Religion

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing…” – Blaise Pascal

The story of Phoebus and the Plastics Conference reveals something deeper than just business strategy. It shows the birth of a new civic religion for America: Consumerism.

For centuries, communities were bound together by shared values: thrift, craftsmanship, neighborliness, saving for hard times, and stewardship of resources that would be passed to the next generation. These were communal survival strategies that built trust and resilience. In New England this was called “Yankee ingenuity.”

The 20th-century corporations systematically dismantled this old faith and replaced it with a new one. In their new gospel:

• Salvation comes through purchase (not through character or community)

• Identity is expressed through brand loyalty (not through craft, skill, or place)

• Progress is measured in newness and disposability (not in durability and repair)

• The good life is defined by what you own (not by who you are or how you contribute)

Advertising spending in the U.S. grew from $6 billion annually in 1950 to over $300 billion today, a 50-fold increase. Advertising became the priesthood of this new religion. The shopping mall replaced the town square as the cathedral of community life. Black Friday became a high holy day. This was cultural engineering on a massive scale. It was a deliberate rewiring of the American psyche to serve corporate profits.

The “Right to Repair” movement is, at its heart, a heresy against this consumerist religion. It asserts that stewardship, skill, and thrift are moral goods. It says that our relationship with objects should be one of care and longevity, not disposable consumption. It rejects the doctrine that newer is always better. When a farmer cannot fix his own tractor due to software locks, or you cannot replace your iPhone battery, it is the legal enforcement of obsolescence. It criminalizes Yankee ingenuity.

The Pathology of Wealth: When Accumulation Becomes Illness

Beyond the economic arguments lies a psychological fact supported by both primate research and modern psychology: extreme, compulsive wealth accumulation is not rational economic behavior. It is often dysfunctional behavior that harms both the accumulator and the community.

In Yale's famous “monkey capitalism” experiments, researchers gave capuchin monkeys tokens to trade for food. The monkeys quickly developed what looked like human economic pathologies: some hoarded tokens long after their needs were met, others engaged in high-risk “gambling” for more, and social hierarchies formed around token wealth. The primates’ behavior wasn't optimizing for survival or well-being; it was pursuing accumulation for its own sake, disrupting social bonds in the process.

Modern psychology observes similar patterns in humans under terms like “wealth addiction” or plutomania. When accumulation becomes compulsive and continues despite damaged relationships, personal isolation, and harm to the community. This behavior mirrors the clinical patterns of addiction: reduced tolerance (needing more to feel secure), withdrawal (anxiety when wealth fluctuates), and continuation despite clear negative consequences.

This isn't about diagnosing individuals. It's about recognizing a socially pathological pattern that our current economic system not only permits but celebrates. Dodge v. Ford legally enshrines what might otherwise be seen as disordered behavior: the compulsive pursuit of profit above all other human considerations. The corporations put profit over health, community, environment, and even the long-term viability of the corporation itself.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans now own more wealth than the entire middle class. The billionaire who accumulates more wealth than could be spent in a thousand lifetimes, while fighting to pay less in taxes that fund the schools and roads his business depends on, is not exhibiting economic rationality. He is exhibiting a failure of economic and social rationality. This is a disconnect from the reality that his fortune depends on the very foundations he undermines.

This pathology has ancient roots. The Greeks called it pleonexia: the insatiable desire for more than one's fair share, which they considered a vice that destroyed both the individual and the polis. Modern economics calls it “maximizing utility.” But when the “utility” being maximized is abstract digits in a bank account, at the cost of sustainable human growth, we must ask: What, exactly, are we optimizing for?

Community First Economics offers a healthier model: one that recognizes that economic success shouldn’t be measured in hoarded capital, but in community well-being. It realigns our economic system with human psychology's deeper need: not for endless accumulation, but for connection, purpose, and legacy.

A Broken Social Contract

As wealth concentrates, the wealthy don’t use their power to become less dependent on the system. They use it to capture it, to bend the rules for their own benefit, socializing risk and privatizing reward. This is where the myth turns actively destructive.

Tax Loopholes & Offshoring: They lobby for lower rates, offshore havens, and “carried interest” rules, ensuring the effective tax rate for billionaires is often lower than for their secretaries. The 400 wealthiest American families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2% in recent years; lower than that of a teacher or firefighter. They benefit from the system, then lobby to defund it.

Corporate Welfare: Entire industries such as fossil fuels, agribusiness, Wall Street, survive on subsidies, bailouts, and sweetheart deals, all defended by armies of lobbyists. The U.S. federal government spends an estimated $181 billion annually on corporate subsidies. We’re told it’s a “free market,” but it’s rigged enterprise.

Regulatory Capture: They fund the campaigns of the officials meant to regulate them, ensuring rules protect incumbents, stifle competition, and externalize costs (like pollution) onto the public.

This isn’t free enterprise. It’s a betrayal of the social contract. The true working class subsidizes the wealthy twice: first through their taxes that build the platform, and second through policies that redirect public wealth upward and undermine our shared foundation.

History’s Warning

This imbalance is not stable. History shows a clear lesson: when too much wealth and power concentrate at the top, societies fracture, often violently. The greed of the few destroys the possibility of happiness for the many, leading to upheaval.

Ancient Rome: The Republic disintegrated as land and wealth pooled among a senatorial elite. Attempts at reform were met with assassination, foreshadowing a century of civil war.

France, 1789: A nobility exempt from taxes bled the peasantry dry. The monarchy’s failure to reform led to revolution and terror.

America, 1929: The Roaring Twenties enriched speculators while workers’ wages stagnated. The resulting Great Depression sparked the New Deal, a peaceful revolution that rebalanced capitalism through regulation, social security, and progressive taxation. It was a course correction that saved capitalism from itself by reaffirming the public foundation.

The pattern is unmistakable. Societies that refuse to correct extreme inequality and rebuild the social contract through reform eventually correct it through chaos. The elite have a choice: share through policy and invest in the common foundation, or risk losing everything when the foundation crumbles.

America at the Tipping Point

Today, the United States faces inequality rivaling the Gilded Age. The top 0.1% own more wealth than the bottom 80% combined. In a nation founded on the promise of opportunity, this is more than just an economic statistic. It is a warning. Unchecked wealth inequality destroys democracy. Political power follows money. When wealth is this concentrated, policy follows the donor class, not the people. The result is the political numbness, rage, and lost faith we see all around us, a direct threat to our collective pursuit of a decent society.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt warned in 1936, battling the “economic royalists” of his day:

“We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

He saved capitalism by reforming it. He understood that taxing the rich is the price of stability, and investment in the common foundation is the price of lasting prosperity and peace.

The choice before our generation is the same as in Rome, France, and 1929 America. We can choose to rebuild a system of shared prosperity, reciprocal obligation, and lasting peace by investing in our common foundation. Or we can cling to the myth, until the whole crumbling structure comes down around us.

Community First Economics is an invitation to choose wisely. To remember that we’re all in this together.

Community First Reform

The goal is not to abolish the corporation. It is to restore it to its proper role within a society dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: a powerful tool for enterprise that operates within a framework of community obligation and contributes to the foundations of widespread economic growth.

This requires a new charter, a new social contract for the 21st century: Conditional Privileges on Community Value: Corporate benefits (tax breaks, permits, limited liability) must be tied to demonstrable community value: good jobs, local investment, environmental stewardship.

Enforce Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR): The polluter must pay. If a company sells a product in New Hampshire, it is financially responsible for its entire lifecycle: collection, recycling, or safe disposal. This aligns the profit motive with the long-term health of our communities and environment.

Enshrine a Strong “Right to Repair”: Pass laws guaranteeing owners and independent shops access to parts, tools, and software. This supports local small businesses, empowers individuals, and pushes back against the engineered waste that fuels the linear economy.

Support the True Engines of Community Happiness: Use policy to actively favor small, local, worker-owned, and cooperative businesses. These types of enterprises keep profits circulating locally and are accountable to people, not distant shareholders.

The Mondragon Corporation: in Spain, is the world’s largest cooperative. Founded in a postwar region of poverty, it now employs over 80,000 worker-owners in manufacturing, finance, retail, and education. Profits are shared equitably, executive pay is capped, and wealth stays rooted in the community. Mondragon funds schools, supports local suppliers, and proves that large-scale enterprise can thrive while being democratic, accountable, and deeply human. 

New Hampshire has its own proud co-op tradition. By nurturing worker-owned businesses in housing, clean energy, and manufacturing, we can build an economy where success is shared, stability is baked in, and the growth of the community is a collective endeavor.

Society once understood that the corporation was our creation. We gave it life to serve us, to help build the common foundations for our pursuit of happiness. We have the power, as voters, as citizens, as a state legislature, to rewrite the rules.

The rise of the corporation was not inevitable. It was a series of choices. We can make new ones. We can build an economy where corporations are strong parts of our communities, not powers over them. It begins by remembering a simple fact: We the people grant the corporate charter. We the people can demand it serve the public good and contribute to the foundations of a society where mutual assured happiness is the goal.