# The Resentment Machine Most people are working harder than their parents did and still falling behind, and nothing in their daily life shows them what's causing it. Why the anger in politics is real and rational but aimed at the wrong target, and why most of the promises to fix it are financed in a way that deepens the divide. - Date: 2026-07-15 - Canonical: https://thenaturalstate.org/essays/the-resentment-machine/ --- Politics is angry because most people are working harder than their parents did and still falling behind, and nothing in their daily life shows them what's causing it. When people feel robbed but can't see the thief, they turn on each other. The anger is real and it's rational. It's just aimed at the wrong target. ## The mechanism underneath Technology keeps making things cheaper to produce, because better tools let the same work create more output. In a free market, that saving reaches you as falling prices, and your money buys a little more every year. You can see it in the corners of life the money system doesn't dominate. Your phone does what a camera, a map, a stereo, and a torch used to do, for close to nothing. But our money is built on debt. Most new pounds come into existence when someone borrows [when a bank makes a loan, it creates the deposit it lends out]. If prices broadly fall, wages eventually follow, but debt repayments stay fixed, so the debt takes a bigger bite of everyone's income until borrowers default and the banks holding their loans fail. A debt-based system can't tolerate broadly falling prices. So governments and central banks create more money and credit to keep prices rising, and they have to do it faster as technology gets faster. That new money doesn't arrive evenly. It reaches financial markets first, so house and share prices jump quickly. Wages move last, because pay gets renegotiated slowly, maybe once a year (that order has a name: the Cantillon effect, whoever receives new money first benefits before prices adjust for everyone else). So people who own assets get richer in pound terms while people who live on a payslip find their pay buys less. Rising prices and falling real wages are the same event seen from two sides. Technology made things cheaper to produce, you worked just as hard, and you didn't get the saving. Working harder than your parents did is what chasing that missing saving looks like. ## Why that comes out as anger at each other The loss is real but invisible. Nobody's payslip shows a line called "transferred to asset owners". People just feel the results. Rent up again. The food shop dearer. The deposit further away year after year. So they look for someone to blame, and the visible candidates are other people. The landlord, the boss, the banker, the immigrant, the boomers, the other party's voters. Some of them even gain from the transfer. None of them built the machine. Scarcity makes groups fight. At a summer camp in the 1950s (the Robbers Cave experiment), researchers split boys into two groups and put them in competition over scarce resources. The groups turned hostile fast. History outside the lab shows the same pattern. Given a shared goal that needed everyone, the hostility faded. Our money system manufactures the feeling of scarcity in the most productive era in human history, because it takes the price falls technology would deliver and replaces them with rising costs. That's why the anger feels so out of proportion. People can sense the abundance exists and can't reach it. ## Why politics feeds the anger instead of fixing it A politician who told the truth would lose. Imagine the honest pitch. "Your pay will go from £50,000 to £48,000, but your costs will fall by more, so you'll be better off." Voters hear the £48,000 and choose the candidate promising £52,000, even though the first deal wins. We're used to judging pay by the number, not by what it buys. So the parties compete on promises of relief: subsidies, transfers, rent caps, and help-to-buy schemes. Most of those promises are financed by creating more money, which pushes prices and asset values up again, which deepens the exact resentment they were meant to cure. Election after election, the divide compounds, and each side becomes more certain the other side is the problem. The one thing never on your ballot paper is the money system itself. Media and social platforms then pour fuel on the anger, because outrage holds attention and attention is what they sell. But the feed did not make people poorer. The falling behind is real, and the money system is what produces it. Economic stress makes tribes. The feed just sorts people into one of them. ## Where it goes if nothing changes Toward control. A system that keeps mass-producing losers has to manage them, so you get more surveillance of money and speech, and emergency powers that don't expire. The worst historical version is Germany in the 1920s, where printing destroyed savings, and a decade later, with the worldwide slump on top of it, people hunted for someone to blame and a strongman offered them targets. I'm not predicting that. I'm saying the direction of travel is set by the incentive, not by the character of whoever's in charge. ## The arguments that point away from the money ### "Anger has many causes: culture, education, social media, immigration." True, and they matter. But the money pressure amplifies every other fault line, because it makes life feel zero-sum, and people fight harder over their differences when they feel they are falling behind. Social media is petrol. The money system is the match. ### "Redistribution will fix the divide." Inside this system, redistribution is financed by creating more money, because the sums run far beyond what taxes can raise, so prices and asset values rise again and the gap reopens. Tax fights attack the effects while the mechanism keeps widening the gap. Politics can blunt the worst of it at the margins. It can't stop the transfer from inside. That's a big part of why decades of redistribution haven't closed the divide. ### "Politics was ever thus. This is just tribalism." Tribalism is ancient, but whether tribes fight tracks how zero-sum life feels. Money outranks the law, because it shapes what laws get written and who they serve. Fix the base and the same tribal instincts have far less to feed on. ### "Bigger government is a choice, not monetary fallout." It looks like a choice. Follow the incentive underneath it. When the money system pushes rents, food and deposits up year after year, voters demand relief from rising costs, and politicians respond with new programmes. The one who refuses is the one offering £48,000. Debased money creates the pain that makes the expansion politically inevitable. Fix the money and the pain that feeds the expansion drains away. ## Where it goes if the base gets fixed Whoever wins the shouting match inside the system, the way out is still fixing the base, which means money nobody can create more of, so productivity reaches everyone as falling prices. Do that and saving works again, the hidden transfer stops, and the manufactured scarcity drains out of politics. That's where bitcoin comes into this story, as the neutral base that lets abundance actually reach people rather than as an investment. It's also the kind of shared goal that ended the hostility at the camp. People who agree on nothing else can agree on rules nobody can bend. When someone can feel life getting cheaper each year, they need someone to blame far less. Anger is a stage. When people first see the transfer, they're furious, and that's better than not seeing it. But it's a rung on a ladder, not a place to live.