Throughout my years of writing about national politics, the number-one strategy of the Democrat Party, every time it's called out on its failed policies, is to deny (lie about) the existence of such failure, and when that doesn't work, Democrats trot out the blame game.

And over the last almost-decade, the Democrats' number-one scapegoat has been... everybody... say it with me!... Donald J. Trump, the devil incarnate.

So when I ran across a story from NBC on Thursday morning that not only acknowledged the continuing economic concerns of tens of millions of hardworking people but also blamed a reason not named Trump, you can imagine my shock and amazement.

Our incredible story begins with Wednesday's episode of NBC's long-running show, "Chicago Fire." 

One of the firefighters is looking for an affordable apartment after her landlord "doubled the rent overnight," which she calls"extortion." She grows more and more frustrated as she continues to come up empty. She asks a fellow firefighter why she's having a hard time, and his explanation is unintentional comedy gold.

Ready? 

In the episode, titled "Permanent Damage," firefighter Lizzy asks firefighter Tony:   

Why is everything worse and more expensive?

Firefighter Tony — who's apparently also a noted economist — doesn't miss a beat as he replies: 

It's called late-stage capitalism.

Far be it from me to be skeptical, but really? 

I'd venture a bet that a strong percentage of Americans -- make that human beings on the planet -- have never heard of "late-stage capitalism," and even if they have heard the term, they have zero or little knowledge of its definition or implications. (We'll get there.)

Here's the short of how the conversation went down:

Lizzy: Ok, this one's $1,500 a month. No pictures, though.

Joe: Yeah, you know that's a dump, right?

Lizzy: Ugh. All right. All right. This one is 1,200, newly renovated, can park in the owner's driveway.

Joe: Uh, that's a van. Do you want a shower over your toilet?

Lizzy: Ugh, no. I don't want any of this. Why is everything worse and more expensive?

Tony: It's called late-stage capitalism.

Again, excuse my skepticism, but I call BS on the scriptwriters. 

This is not to suggest I'm shocked, of course. What used to be entertainment has metastasized into left-wing propaganda to the point of being unwatchable for tens of millions of Americans who refuse to tolerate the nonsense.

So what exactly is "late-stage capitalism," who came up with the theory, and for what purpose?

Late-Stage Capitalism

Let's begin with Karl Marx, shall we (emphasis, mine)?

Karl Marx believed that capitalism was unsustainable and prone to collapse, soon to be replaced by his favored system of communism, in which goods and services would be distributed by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” on the basis of need, rather than bought and sold in the marketplace.  

In 1916, Vladimir Lenin—who was later to become the first Soviet dictator—wrote a treatise entitled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he identifies imperialism as capitalism’s “highest” and final stage. For Lenin, the rise of imperialism and the concentration of capitalism into monopolies were the harbingers of capitalism’s demise and the dawn of socialism.

The term “late-stage capitalism” originally gained prominence in the 1970s, when the Marxist sociologist Ernest Mandel used it to describe a new globalized phase of capitalism marked by the dominance of multinational corporations, financial speculation, and mass consumerism. We have been waiting for this “late-stage” to pass for half a century now—and yet it has not passed.

The illogical logic of the left has always both amused me and concerned me; the latter due to willfully low-information rank-and-file Democrat voters who blindly support or oppose virtually everything they're fed by the Democrat Party and its lapdog media. Let's call them "useful idiots."

Even worse, in the Age of Trump, irrational hatred has led a sizable percentage of the population to abandon even the slightest of facts and logic and replace both with bitterness and extreme emotions. 

RELATED READING: The Infection in America

The following view on the concept of "late-term capitalism" nicely sums up the reality of capitalism, which unsurprisingly, is the antithesis of the narrative of leftist elitists. 

Capitalism is the only economic system that includes reliable, built-in incentives to solve problems by organically removing bad ideas, products, and companies, and replacing them with better ones in a reasonable time frame, without violence.

Capitalism is not a product with a beginning-middle-end life cycle. It’s an organically evolving system, in a constantly shifting state of change and adaptation. Any part of it – products, services, technology, and people – things that don’t work or don’t deliver value are replaced with things that do.

Late-stage capitalism is a phrase used by people who want to imply that capitalism is doomed to fail, usually with the implication that it will happen soon and that it must be replaced by an alternate economic system (typically socialism, communism or some variant).

I don't know. Maybe we should ask firefighter Tony to weigh in, given his expertise on the subject.

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