The American dollar is a magical thing. On its back is printed an unfinished pyramid, crowned by the Eye of Horus. And there are some who remember that many of our founding fathers were closet mystics and secret freemasons. Powered by greed, channeled through idealism and ever-expanding knowledge, America was to have been Atlantis reborn, growing into its boots in the age of Aquarius. (An intention easily confirmed by the presence of the scorpio eagle, dexter on the front of the seal, which we all know to represent the Egyptian phoenix...)

They were romantics, but, frankly, not adept magicians. Imbue a monetary system with the power of a pyramid, and what do you expect to get? A pyramid economy, of course. But if you place that spell on the back, you get an inverted pyramid—unstable and cyclical. Sloppy spellwork, if you ask me.

Have you ever played a pyramid game? It’s a form of gambling, like Amway, in which a group of people sit down at the table and deposit money. Everyone can win, and everyone expects to. But sooner or later someone gets tired, or runs out of resources, and quits. Then there are fewer people to divide the pot. Someone else quits, and so it goes until the pot is divided among those who endured to the top of the “pyramid.” To win you need a very large wallet, or the grit to risk everything you have. (Of course, if everything you have isn’t enough,you’re out of the game by default.) That’s what made America great. Everybody wins, as long as somebody loses.

But in America, we didn’t bet our money. We bet our lives that any man’s son could be president. For a while, at least, this was potentially true. Until the pyramid economy solidified.

You see, if most of the money is in the hands of most of the people, you have a stable labor/agriculture base. Nobody has a lot, but everybody has enough. The middle, smaller group has a little more money as a reward for developing skills. And the smallest group attains a level of wealth roughly ten times that of its neighbors in reward for excellence. Healthy competition of skills and ideas keeps the yeast rising, and civilization grows.

If most of the money is concentrated in the middle, this diamond can be called the golden age of any culture. Few people are needed to feed the population, and the bulk of the nation invests its lives in building and creating new things. Civilization blooms.

When the pyramid is overturned, most of the money is in the hands of a very few. The rest of the people don’t have enough of anything to bet anymore.

Then the game stops. And civilization dies.

In 1929, just before the first Great Depression, the richest 20% of Americans had managed to secure an unprecedented 78% of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom 20% survived on three-tenths of 1%. By 1989 this was again becoming true...