[Download Full document (PDF)]
Deep Dive Audio Overview
Video Explainer
The world stands at a historic inflection point. The neoliberal economic order, underpinned by financialization, privatization, and the unearned income of a resurgent rentier class, has hollowed out the productive base of nations, eroded democratic sovereignty, and fueled a cascading crisis of inequality, ecological degradation, and geopolitical destabilization. In Return of the Robber Barons, Michael Hudson exposes the reemergence of parasitic oligarchy masked as patriotic industrialism — wherein tariff policy is weaponized not to restore national capacity but to shield the wealth of the elite from progressive taxation, further burdening labor and dismantling the public domain.
This white paper offers a comprehensive diagnosis and prescriptive pathway forward by integrating Hudson’s critical insights with the Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) framework — a rigorous value philosophy that anchors all policy and economic decision-making to the principle of enabling, not disabling, life. We trace the historical and structural transition from productive industrial capitalism to rentier finance capitalism and the parallel collapse of fiscal democracy. Neoliberalism, we argue, is not merely a set of policies but a systemically incoherent value regime: it taxes life while untaxing rent, rewards speculation over creation, and measures success by the extraction of margin rather than the enhancement of life capacity.
Tariffs, in this context, serve as a symbolic fulcrum: either they can serve to enable national development through life-grounded public investment — as they once did during the American industrial takeoff — or they can be wielded as regressive instruments that inflate costs, suppress demand, and entrench oligarchy, as in the current paradigm. Without a coordinated public provisioning strategy, debt relief, and structural shift away from FIRE-sector dominance, any calls for reindustrialization will ring hollow.
The geopolitical implications of this economic logic are profound. Hudson’s analysis reveals the United States’ increasing reliance on coercive financial dominance — sanctions, conditionality, and military-backed debt enforcement — mirroring the final stages of imperial overreach seen throughout history. Yet a multipolar world is emerging, led by states reclaiming sovereign monetary policy, infrastructure investment, and resource sovereignty. These developments echo the core tenets of LVOA: life-centric governance, public credit for public good, and a systemic reorientation toward planetary coherence.
In the final sections of this paper, we present a concrete blueprint for regenerative sovereignty: a transition from privatized value capture to public value creation. This includes proposals for a LifeCoin currency anchored in the provisioning of life-goods, the revival of public banking, tax reform targeting economic rents, and the formation of regional development commons. It culminates in a call for a planetary pact — rooted in justice, transparency, and the restoration of trust in our shared capacity to live well together on a finite Earth.
This is not a return to protectionism. It is a return to protection of life. A return not to the robber barons of old, but to the public purpose that animated the original vision of industrial prosperity — now reimagined for the regenerative age.
