By Steve Beaman, CEO of The Alterna Group
In the age of outrage, truth is rarely the currency. Emotion is. And few emotions are more lucrative than envy.
Today, politicians aren’t trying to solve problems; they’re trying to sustain them. They’ve learned that resentment pays better than results. And so they keep stoking the fire, building what I call The Jealousy Economy—a system where blame is the product and power is the payoff. Let’s be clear: this isn’t new. We’ve seen this script before.
In the Soviet Union, they promised equality and delivered gulags. In Cuba, they promised justice—and delivered poverty and repression. North Korea built total control on the back of “equity.” Venezuela went from oil-rich to breadline poor under the banner of redistribution. And now, the same narrative creeps into American politics—less violent, but just as dangerous. It begins with the speeches.
Rage-filled, wealth-blaming sermons from polished politicians who claim to hate the rich… while cashing donor checks and flying private. Bernie Sanders has three homes and a net worth more than $3 million. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned “Tax the Rich” into a merch line. Nancy Pelosi trades stocks with better timing than most hedge funds. These people aren’t anti-capitalist. They’re anti-competition. They’re not fighting for the poor. They’re fighting for control. They don’t offer solutions, they offer enemies. They don’t inspire ambition, they exploit resentment. And it works.
Young voters, especially Millennials and Gen Z, have been raised in a world where opportunity often feels out of reach—buried under debt, wage pressure, and institutional failure. Instead of teaching them to rise, politicians tell them to rage. Instead of showing them how to build wealth, they’re told to hate those who already have it. What’s left is a generation groomed for protest, not prosperity.
But here’s the truth they don’t want to admit even in today’s “unfair, unequal, and unjust” America, the average poor person lives better than the vast majority of people under so-called utopias. Our poor have access to food, medicine, smartphones, air conditioning, and relative safety. In North Korea, people eat grass. In Venezuela, they eat zoo animals.
In Western societies, poverty is a condition. In failed socialist systems, it’s a sentence. The real divide in our culture isn’t Left vs. Right. That’s a distraction. It’s Liberty vs. Control. Picture a circle: liberty at the top, tyranny at the bottom. Both political extremes—radical right or left—slide downward into authoritarianism. The true battle is whether we rise toward personal responsibility and opportunity or fall into managed dependence and collective bitterness. And here’s the grift: If the problems were ever solved, these politicians would lose their power.
So they won’t solve them. They’ll just write more emails.They’ll cash more checks. They’ll post more clips. They’ll stir the pot… and tell you that you’re the victim of someone else’s success. But don’t buy it. Because when you hate success, you kill ambition. When you resent the rich, you close your mind to wealth-building. When you vote out of jealousy, you often vote against your own future.
Here’s the good news: You’re not powerless. You’ve just been told you are—by people who get paid when you believe it. You have a mind. A voice. A skill. A vision. You don’t need permission to rise. You need the courage to ignore the noise and get to work. Reject envy. Reclaim agency.
Because the jealousy economy doesn’t just exploit your frustration, it steals your future.
