"A further note on the positive feedback loop nature of capitalism: How is it possible for a human being born into this society to make money to try and escape that trap?
A] Work for wages -- which means do labor that has some level of value, and then have your boss take as much of that value for himself as he can get away with based on how desperate the other possible laborers in the economy are at present. It is fundamentally impossible for one laborer to move up in the economic food chain without further enriching a very wealthy individual already ahead of him.
B] Have a great idea and want to start your own company? Great! Go take out a massive loan from a bank and whether you succeed or fail, pay the bank more money than they gave you. You cannot create wealth for yourself without necessarily paying a portion of it up the ladder. Thus, social mobility for a few of the many poor entails further enrichment of the few wealthy, which means a smaller proportion remaining for the rest of the impoverished. The growth of inequality is absolutely inevitable (when it gets so bad we're forced to either intervene or simply let the wealthy come in like vultures and pick everything off the desperate workers at discounted prices during the recession).
What happens when you mix the necessity of property ownership in? What does a man do who is born into this society? He needs access to land in order to provide for himself -- either by growing food, building a shelter, or having a space to perform some skill/trade/craft. What happens when all of that land has already been stolen from those who originally used it and dwelt upon it and scooped up by the Boomers and those who came before them?
The poor in this country are fucked. The young in this country are poor. The assets of this country are firmly in the hands of the older and wealthier generations who got theirs when America had access to half the world's resources and then kicked out the ladder from beneath them, began privatizing everything, and began pumping out all of this neo-liberalism horseshit about "free markets."
Pro-tip: America likes free markets because America has the most money and influence, which means in any "free" trade, America is going to come out on top. That's how the coercive power of money works. If you have a lot and other people don't, but they desperately need it to survive, grow, and thrive, then they are going to be in a position where they are willing to work for much less or pay much higher prices, simply because they are desperate.
Adam Smith outlined this clearly; while two nations can each trade in their comparative advantage to their mutual benefit (i.e. one is better at making textiles, one is better at making wine), if one nation is better at making both textiles and wine, then the other nation can do nothing to compete. The only thing it can do is be exploited. Especially if we can cheaply pay to transport goods across the world so that we can abuse perpetually existing desperate pockets of the globe by forcing them to "compete" the only way they can: BY BEING WILLING TO WORK FOR SLAVE WAGES. This willingness then deflates the cost of their labor, even though the value of the labor is identical to what it would have been if the factories were located somewhere where the human beings doing the labor were required to be paid human living wages rather than treated like animals in cages."