The title pretty-much describes the functional reality of most of what's wrong in America today.

America is presumably a capitalist nation.  Capitalism is an economic system where buyers and sellers enter bids and offers for various goods and services and the laws of supply and demand tend to dictate where price, production, expansion and contraction fall.

Its not a perfect system; among other things its reactionary by nature, in that until demand shows up supply will not, and thus it is always "behind" if you will.  However, it has over time proved to be superior to any sort of central control.

There is a fly in the ointment: Humans are not necessarily good -- either all the time or even most humans some of the time.  In fact most humans will pick up a $20 bill that is sitting on the sidewalk and put it in their pocket after taking a quick look around to see if anyone will actually see them do it.  This, even if they have reason to believe it fell out of the guy's pocket 20' in front of them and for the majority even if they saw it fall out.

Now just because you took advantage of a situation doesn't make you a bad person.  If you in no way influenced the other person's bad decision or the outcome from it then to feast on it is perfectly fine both ethically and morally.  You owe that individual nothing and in fact it is precisely this that powers productivity and capitalism forward!

That is, if I can take advantage of some unrelated person's idiocy such that I can rent their office space for a tiny fraction of what they were paying because the owner has to fill it, the original lessee has no money and thus can't fulfil their contract and I have both money and need for the space there's nothing wrong with that.  I had no part of creating either party's unfortunate circumstance.

But now let's take a different scenario.

I'm a dude with political power.  I also own a bunch of rental properties.  This puts me in a position to influence policy in a manner that causes a supply/demand imbalance in the rental housing market.  Let's say that, for example, I arrange with the Federal government to "welcome" a few thousand "migrants" into my town, all of whom come with serious federal subsidies amounting to a couple of thousand dollars a month plus they have work permits.

Think about what happens here.  The local employer base can pay these people less because they have a $24,000 annual tax free subsidy that the Federal government "gives" them.  In truth they didn't give anyone anything -- they stole it from US Citizens since the government can't make money -- it can only transfer it from one person to another.  In addition the local residents do not qualify for that same $24,000 annual subsidy and thus the price of rent now increases dramatically because the supply of housing does not change much on a rapid basis but the demand does and the people that are presenting the new demand are obtaining, by force, the $24,000 from the rest of the US population.

As the landlord I'm happier than a pig in shit.  I can (and do) double or even triple the rent.  When the American citizens can't pay and the "migrants" can, guess who gets the apartment?  While my costs might go up a bit (more people, more wear, etc.) my profits skyrocket.

The problem is that I didn't honestly earn the money.  I deliberately put in motion a scheme where I indirectly stole tens of thousands of dollars per person, per year for each apartment through the tenants and ultimately from every US Citizen.  The harm to anyone citizen is diffuse but just as someone who skims ten cents each from 10 million account holders in a bank I still stole a million bucks.

Worse, the harm is not entirely diffuse.  The townsfolk who are displaced get the immediate negative impact of having their place to live ripped out from under them.  Given the further-depressed wage base in the local area which I created whether on purpose or simply as a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the policy I screwed them twice -- first by ripping their place to live out from under them by soliciting the subsidy and then again by destroying wages in the local area so they can't replace either their job or their apartment.

This isn't a "natural" capitalist circumstance and there is no creative destruction of someone who made a poor decision and as a result someone else who happens along gets to feast on the back of the voluntarily poor decision of the schlub who made it.

To some people these situations may look similar -- but they're not.

How about the medical field.  We now know that "big sugar" bribed medical researchers; they paid for work to target their desired results and there was no disclosure that they funded that work.  Now that would be bad enough but in fact it gets worse because if you can manage to convince people of something like this and it screws you then the business interests who make money because you're screwed love it -- so long as you don't blame them.

In other words in a capitalist system your incentive is to spend the least you can on medical care to obtain an acceptable result.  Your physician's and the local hospital's incentive is to get you to spend every available dollar to obtain an acceptable result, and if you run out of dollars then advocating for shifting some of that price onto other people by force (since they'd never do it voluntarily) is next.  There is no incentive in the medical system to promote anything that leads you to spend less or even better, nothing even if the result would be objectively superior!

The tension between buyer and seller is normal in a capitalist system however as soon as others are forced to pay the bill then your incentives are destroyed and the provider is enriched at the cost, forcibly extracted, of others.

The nuances of this are complicated but it all comes down to one thing: Capitalism isn't forcing others to pay someone else's bill; that's theft and since theft always involves involuntary taking no matter the actor involved it is supposed to be a crime.  Further, when such theft distorts the market then the people who are priced out of whatever it was by said theft are immediately and irreparably harmed.

How do we redress this?  Well, there are plenty of laws on the books (8 USC 1324 and 15 USC Ch 1) dealing with most of these practices but nobody has been criminally prosecuted and sent to prison for either of these offenses in decades despite there literally being too many instances of these acts on a daily basis to list.  They continue because nobody goes to jail; the richer you are (that is, the more you exploit people and rob them on an individual or collective basis) the more prison sucks compared to your daily lifestyle.  It thus is the ultimate progressive punishment; the homeless man doesn't think of prison as all that bad compared to the alternative while Jeff Bezos, a Mayor or Governor would find it an extraordinarily bad thing.

That's how it should be.

But financial punishment is not enough when the harm is irreparable.  Money damages do not bring back dead people or restore a destroyed life.  Time can never be recovered and thus there are crimes for which the only reasonable punishment is execution.  This set of offenses, in size, is of that kind and character and incidentally this behavior by American government and business interests is, when you boil it all down, in fact identical in form and fashion to slavery which we allegedly banned by Constitutional Amendment.