It's working exactly as intended.
From the time of the Magna Carta up until the Industrial Revolution, the ability for serfs to own land saw the rise of a middle, merchant class that had none of the responsibilities of governance or leadership but had the benefits of being materially rich. Those that had enough money to buy land could own taverns and shops without being excessively taxed and so eventually - over the course of hundreds of years - they rose to have fabulous amounts of wealth. However, because they were still under the servitude of a king/queen, they could never have ultimate power.
The solution was to create forms of credit with rates of interest so that the merchants would be able to take from the people their means of livelihood if they didn't pay. A form of financial slavery. Then by the time of the industrial revolution, these merchants realized that in order to truly be in power, they needed to wipe out a large portion of those that had no need of loans (since there was no products that you would need to go into debt to buy) while profiting from the new mechanized production systems - hence World War 1, followed by the Great Depression and World War 2...all of which were systematically engineered to enslave the population and their governments into massive amounts of debt as consumerism heated up.
What they feared most was the people rising up and creating their own form of Manga Carta against the merchant class. This is exactly what Marx and Lenin advocated, which is why Communism is so hated in the Western world. It's also why China sees themselves as the hope of the world through their OBOR policy.
The world is sinking back into a situation where there is no middle class. It will be just the wealthy and the serfs...but the serfs have this illusion of power, because they are 'better off' than those who are poorer than they are. Is it the wealthy that support those poor on welfare? Nope, it's us poor serfs. That's why people are time poor - their entire wage is going to servicing debts, superannuation or tax.
The end result is that instead of leaving an inheritance to your children - which is how most wealth is generated - people are now just spending it up because it's the only time in their life they actually have to enjoy themselves.
That's why when I see those Crisco campaigners, I'm just incredibly sad, because that's exactly where everyone is headed...and they don't even realize it.