We now know two things. Money is created as debt with interest (Chapter 1). Profit comes from paying workers less than they produce (Chapter 2). Now let's watch what happens when this runs over time.
Same economy. One owner, ten workers, one bank. Let's run three cycles and track where the money goes after each one.
Workers earned wages — and spent them on food, rent, goods. Their money flowed right back to the companies. At the end of each cycle, they're back to zero. The owner, meanwhile, accumulates. The bank takes its cut. The gap widens every round.
Nobody cheated. Nobody stole. The structure moved money upward.
Workers spend their wages. They have to — on food, rent, transportation, clothes. The money they earn goes right back to the companies that employ them (or other companies owned by other owners). This isn't irresponsible spending. It's the cost of being alive.
The owner doesn't need to spend all their profit to survive. They can save it, invest it, use it to buy more companies. Wealth doesn't just accumulate — it compounds. The rich get richer not because they work harder each cycle, but because wealth generates more wealth while wages get spent.
Now the owner is wealthy. Their company is worth millions on paper. If they took a salary or sold shares, they'd pay income or capital gains tax — potentially 30–40%. So instead, they do something perfectly legal:
Now compare what happens in a single year:
The worker paid €16,000 in taxes on €40,000 of earnings. The owner spent €500,000 and paid nothing. This isn't illegal. It isn't a loophole being exploited against the spirit of the law. This is how the system is designed.
Tax avoidance accelerates inequality, but it isn't the cause. Even if the owner paid full taxes on every euro of profit, the fundamental dynamic remains: each cycle, profit flows to owners, wages flow to workers, workers spend wages to survive, and the gap grows.
Tax reform can slow the accumulation. It cannot stop it. Because the engine is the structure itself — the debt that demands growth, the profit that demands a wage gap, and the loop that moves money upward every single cycle.
Taxing wealth more fairly is worth doing.
But it's treating a symptom.
The disease is a system where money flows upward by design,
not by accident.
Watch wealth accumulate over time. Try reforms. See what changes — and what doesn't.
Wealth doesn't concentrate because some people work harder or because the system is "broken." It concentrates because the system is working exactly as designed — debt demands growth, growth demands profit, and profit demands a gap between work and wages.
The economy must grow forever to service its debts. Growth requires extracting more labor and more resources each cycle. Labor is squeezed for profit. Resources are pulled from the earth.
This system requires infinite growth on a finite planet.