Early yesterday morning, Kelly Williamson, a white-collar worker on Amazon’s asset-protection team at Whole Foods in Austin, woke up to an alarming text from work to check her email.

“Review asap and stay home from work today,” it said, according to the Wall Street Journal. That text led to an email saying her role at the company was going to be eliminated.

Her badge and work laptop were deactivated, her personal belongings were going to be mailed to her. Six years at the company—over in an instant.

Kelly was just one of 14,000 office workers who woke up to the same message this week, part of Amazon’s AI-driven plan to eliminate 10 percent of its white-collar jobs.

And while much has been written about the impending onslaught of AI-driven layoffs, little has been written in corporate media about the system behind it that’s fueling it in the first place.

As Chris Reed, another worker who was just laid off from his job at Toyota also told the Journal, “the system just feels like it’s messed up.” He’s not wrong.

Business doesn’t work the way we were taught it does. Amazon made nearly $60 billion in profit last year—so why is one of the richest companies on Earth firing thousands of people?

Kelly—and 14,000 others—just found out why: the way most Americans think the economy works is a lie. And it may be the biggest, most widely believed lie in America today.

Anybody who ever had a lemonade stand as a kid knows how business works. It’s simple math: make more money than you spend. If you bought $5 of supplies and sold $7 of lemonade, congrats—you’re running a profitable business. It all seems so straightforward.

But that’s not how the American—or global—economy works anymore. What matters isn’t how much money you make, but how much more you make than last year.

That’s why companies like Amazon and UPS—both raking in billions in annual profits—are still dumping workers.

On Wall Street, $60 billion in profit is only a “success” if you made $30 billion last year. That’s 20% growth! But if profits fall from $36 billion to $30 billion, that’s a 17% decline—and your stock price nosedives.

So businesses have to keep growing, no matter the cost. Launching new ventures takes years and billions, but cutting payroll gets instant results. For most corporations, labor is their biggest expense.

If you’re making the same profits as last year, slash 10,000 jobs and suddenly your earnings tick upward. The line on the chart goes up—and that’s all that matters.

That’s the absurd reality of grown-up, late-stage capitalism: success means more no matter who it or what it hurts.

It didn’t always work this way. For much of the 20th century, government regulations and steep taxes helped build a stable, broadly shared prosperity—not just shareholder returns.

Companies that made big profits reinvested them into better products, better pay, and the future, because anything else was costly for the people at the top. With top tax rates on personal income and capital gains above 70 percent—sometimes over 90—there was little incentive for executives to chase short-term payouts.

Then came a new economic gospel out of the University of Chicago. Led by economist Milton Friedman, it preached that a company’s only real responsibility was to its shareholders.

In a 1970 essay for The New York Times Magazine, Friedman wrote that the “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Once a fringe idea, it soon became the guiding philosophy of Wall Street and Washington alike.

Within a decade, Reagan’s White House turned that theory into policy—slashing taxes, deregulating markets, and freeing corporations to treat shareholders as their only constituency. The top tax rate on investment income today is roughly 20 percent.

Reagan’s administration also legalized stock buybacks—once considered a form of market manipulation—and they’ve since become the great siphon of corporate profits.

Last year alone, America’s biggest companies spent over a trillion dollars buying back their own stock—money that went back to investors that could’ve gone to new products, higher pay, or better benefits.

Now, corporations aren’t rewarded for reinvesting profits; they’re rewarded for distributing them. Around 70 percent of corporate profits go to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, not to workers, research, or innovation.

Yes, Chris, the system is messed up.

The crowd was right the other night at the Zohran Mamdani rally in New York City when they chanted at the state’s uber-capitalist governor Kathy Hochul to “tax the rich!”

Raising taxes on corporations and high earners—and closing the loopholes that keep their fortunes untouchable—is essential to narrowing the chasm between workers and capitalists. But that’s only the start.

The deeper problem is that “growth at any cost” isn’t just a corporate obsession. It’s the law. Decades of legislation and court decisions have cemented the idea that a company’s primary duty is to its shareholders—not its workers, customers, community, or the planet.

Some industries face token regulations that nod toward public good, but nowhere in American law is there a sweeping requirement to value people and the environment as much as profit.

Changing that legal foundation is the first step toward a humane economy. But it can’t stop there.

We need to draw a clear line between the marketplace and the things no human should ever have to earn—housing, education, food, healthcare. Those shouldn’t be “business opportunities.” They should be basic rights, guaranteed to everyone, everywhere.

Only when every human on the planet has access to these basic necessities of life—without fear of ever losing them—should a “free” market takeover.

And beyond that, we need to bring democracy into the places where most of us spend our lives: our workplaces. The people who make a company run should own a stake in it and have a voice in how it’s led.

Imagine if workers—not distant shareholders—decided whether to cut jobs, raise pay, or reinvest profit. Imagine if the purpose of business wasn’t to grow endlessly, but to sustain the people and communities that make growth possible in the first place.

Because the biggest lie in American business has always been that it’s simple—that if you make more than you spend, everyone wins.

Instead, Kelly and Chris found out the hard way: we built a system where even record profits aren’t enough. Growth for its own sake has replaced the basic math of fairness, stability, and common sense.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can still build an economy that works like we were taught it should—one where the equation finally adds up, and the people who make the wealth share in it.