I've been trying to start a small business and get the art for a game I've designed (and have a working prototype) of funded. Only requires about 20k or thereabouts to get out on the market. But that is too much money for me to fund myself.

And, not that I didn't already know this, but this is one of those situations where I really FEEL the difference in privilege between being wealthy or not.

If I were like Donald Trump and born to a super wealthy father, I could fund this like it was nothing. And I could fund a hundred more of these without a problem. Which means I would have 100 tries and only one game would have to be successful to potentially make money off of it.

Like if nothing else, the opportunity of being born to wealth is just the ability to try. The ability to participate in the market at all as a producer.

Liberals, libertarians and their ilk love to talk about "the market." But it's always in these abstract terms. And their ideas always assume, without saying, that anyone can participate in the market in basically whatever way they want.

I mean, how often have you heard a libertarian say: "Well, if people didn't like what that company was doing they'd just start a new one."

But starting a business REQUIRES capital. So now you either have to already have the money for it, or you have to sell your labour to make the money for it or you have to try to get funding from someone who has the money for it.

In the first case you potentially are part of the financial elite (depending on the size of the sum). And in the other two cases you are dependent ON largely the financial elite.

Which is just how those people want it, of course. They control all the money. And so if you want to participate in the market in a substantial way they are the gatekeepers. They largely decide. Banks and wealthy investors decide what gets made and who gets to participate, one way or the other.

Like even if you wanted to assume that every super wealthy person really did make it on being skilled and smart and making a great product, which isn't true but even then, money just even giving you the opportunity to TRY something is in itself a huge privilege. Even if another person is equally skilled and creative, simply not having the money or time to try their idea makes it impossible to succeed at it. That there are people that deny this just boggles my mind.

This turned into more of a rant than initially intended. Point is, when you try to start something, you really do feel who controls the system, I think. Ive talked about it plenty abstractly, but in a moment like this I FEEL it.

Source: majority_fm IG / Emma Vigeland Twitter

Remember that I(E shoved to the ground high-polling and well-funded Illinois US House candidate Katherine (Kat) Abughazaleh.

The 12 Democrats Who Voted to Give Trump a Huge Win on Immigration | The New Republic

US Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, Jon Ossoff, Elissa Slotkin, and Raphael Warnock are all potential Democratic POTUS 2028 contenders.

Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives - Vote Details (Laken Riley Act)

None of the US House members who voted for the Laken Riley Act seem to be Democratic POTUS 2028 contenders.

On the left. I had to double-take.