It’s all ‘Honors in the Dolla’ out here. Time to buy back Quality.
3 min read
Last month I caught the podcast Good One with Bill Burr as the guest. Funny episode, worth a listen. At one point, Burr joked his way into a brutal truth when he said, “…the level of corruption with all of these politicians and how much money they're making from these people who’ve been poisoning our food supply. I mean they hook up with the pharmaceutical people. Like your job is to go out here and eat poison, get sick, buy the drugs, stay alive long enough, make your claim, have it denied after you've paid insurance, and then die and then have all of that debt passed on to the people.”
It’s hilarious in the moment — until you realize how uncomfortably close it mirrors your morning routine.
Every so often you bump into something so absurd it jolts you awake. Maybe it’s a $5 cup of coffee that tastes worse than instant, or a subscription service quietly hiking your rate while offering shit shows and shittier movies. You laugh, you shrug — but then it hits you: how did this become normal?
This is the quiet danger of late-stage capitalism. The system that was supposed to reward quality, punish waste, and self-correct when companies failed… has been hacked. Today, it rewards scale, lobbying, marketing, and manipulation. The result? Inferior goods and services dominate the shelves, while the players in control extract more and more value from less and less substance.
Once upon a time, the story was simple:
Build something useful.
Deliver value.
Earn customers.
But that logic erodes in oversaturated markets. When products are nearly indistinguishable, branding trumps quality. When firms grow too big, they can afford to buy out or bully the competition. When governments lean on corporate funding, policy tilts to protect incumbents.
And so the cycle repeats: the user base (consumers) adapts downward, while the controllers (corporations, financiers, policymakers) squeeze upward. That’s how we arrive at the Brawndo timeline — the one satirized in Idiocracy — where the loudest, cheapest, most hollow option wins because inertia, convenience, and fatigue do the rest.
Why This is a Problem for You
Because in that kind of system, the average consumer has almost no defense — except one:
radical selectivity.
If you don’t pause before spending, you’re subsidizing a machine that thrives on your lowered expectations. But if you do pause — if you get austere, if you start treating every dollar as a filter — you suddenly create friction. You stop playing into the rigged game.
This is not about becoming a miser. It’s about recognizing that every purchase, every swipe, every trade is a vote. You are voting for a timeline. And in an era where capital flows faster than legislation, where lobbying outpaces regulation, those micro-votes matter more than speeches or tweets.
What Investors Can Learn from $JUST
Paul Tudor Jones understood this back in 2018 when he launched the $JUST ETF. At its core, the idea was simple: what if you could invest not only for return, but for reinforcement? Reinforcing companies that pay fairly, reduce harm, and actually serve the communities they sell into.
Was it perfect? No. Was it better than blindly throwing money at whoever shouted the loudest? Absolutely. The lesson isn’t about ESG branding — it’s about intent. Capital without intent is fuel for entropy. Capital with intent is leverage for change.
And that’s as true in your grocery cart as it is in your retirement account.
The Fork in the Road
We’re either heading toward a landscape where convenience + scale erase quality altogether… or toward one where individuals reclaim selectivity as a form of economic agency.
One path leads to overpriced, non-organic coffee, endless subscription hikes packed with ads, processed food loaded with empty calories — all drifting toward the ‘Brawndo effect’ as the default: the cheap, hollow output of a system built to squeeze every last Dollar. The other path? It forces companies (and even governments staring down shutdowns) to actually earn your trust, because YOU make them — by refusing to reward shortcuts and reclaiming quality with where your dollars go.
Bottom line: Capitalism doesn’t guarantee quality. It guarantees survival of the fittest system controllers. If you want quality back, you have to buy it back — selectively, intentionally, even austerely.
📩 At BMG, we help clients carry this mindset into their portfolios. Because your money should reinforce value, not just chase momentum. Ready to think twice before your next dollar goes to work? Let’s talk.
