Just watched all seasons of Peaky Blinders and it occurs to me: Society and the criminal world are really mirror images of one another. They have a symbiotic relationship, all of it to do with avoiding the tax man.

The underworld tries to transform dirty money into wealth, and the system tries to make sure dirty money stays dirty and wealth stays at the top.

Where people can’t find jobs, there will be dirty money. If the only money you have is dirty, the only way you can build wealth is by washing it. You can’t buy property if you can’t pay taxes.

That’s why organized crime exists. Organized criminals are better able to wash their money through seemingly legitimate ways and get away with it. It allows them to turn dirty money into wealth. Witness all those glass towers in Miami.

Peaky Blinders is set in England, but it puts me in mind of Gangs of New York. Different factions of the underworld fighting over slices of the pie. I think just about every ethnic group in America has had some kind of mafia.

The mainstream and its favored tribes are less likely to need a mafia because it has the police and the law. The legitimately wealthy get to use police to fight their battles with the ambitious poor and keep the illusion of clean hands.

Gangsters tend to get themselves killed or thrown in prison and don’t get to taste the aristocrat’s life for long, but as long as their operations are running successfully, they’re paying the guy who took the deal and that business hires people.

That’s where the real trickle down happens. The slow conversion of dirty money into small amounts of clean money.

People have been gambling, paying for sex and doing drugs for as long as anyone has kept track. People at the top, and just below the top, and every level below the top will find a way to get those things no matter what the law says.

Where there is dirty money, there will be laundering. Where there is laundering, the system will try to stop it. By cracking down harder or by seizing the means of corruption. Then all that vice starts with clean money and produces clean tax money.

It may capture the means and turn it into something taxable. That’s why we have state lotteries instead of the numbers racket. It’s why Vegas and all those mini-Vegases exist.

It’s why everybody uses plastic now, instead of folding money. The system got tired of all that papermoney disappearing off the grid and producing wealth outside the system.

But capitalism’s evil shadow always finds a way. Now we have cryptocurrency, so the black market can convert those digital ones and zeros into clean currency.

The system can “declare war” and crack down harder, but that raises the price, which just makes it easier to bribe people. With enough money and potential for violence, every means of enforcement can be corrupted.

Like Tommy Shelby says in Peaky Blinders, “Everyone is a whore, we just sell different parts of ourselves.” Some people sell their bodies, some sell their integrity.

Why wouldn’t it go that way? These are our values. Wealth trumps everything. We don’t mind when billionaires thumb their noses at the law and get away with it. They’re our heroes. We watch them on TV.

We don’t want to stop them. We want to be them.

Which is why capitalism’s shadow won’t go away no matter how strict our society gets. All that wealth stuck behind that logjam at the top. All the rest of us who can observe that with a good work ethic, you’re lucky to pay the rent, much less get wealthy.

All that mess is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he said “money is the root of all evil.” We’ve made the act of getting rich into a virtue in itself, so what else should we expect?

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BTW, if you think the above is a conspiracy theory about a shady cabal making all that happen, you don’t have enough imagination. I’m way crazier than that. I’m saying the system has a mind of its own. I’m saying it’s alive. And we live inside it.