A common thing you'll hear from people who've "made it" is that they didn't teach XYZ in school. For instance, who went to public school to learn personal finance?
Indeed, there are a great many things you don't learn in school because "good schools" typically prepare you to be a certain type of person: employees or professionals. Many people have led lives thinking very little about money—they get paid enough at work to pay the bills, and so they pay the bills. And then, taxes, insurance, and other potentially complicated things get handled automatically through an employer.
The way a lot of money stuff works in the "free world" seems... rather sinister. First off, there's the whole thing about fiat currency; our US Dollars are based on what? They are debt, backed by the belief that such-and-such will pay back such-and-such. And so more and more tresury notes can be "printed" (or integers added to bank accounts) as the powers at be see fit to stimulate the economy, boost certain initiatives, and so and and so forth.
On the level of personal finance, microeconomics pretty much makes sense in that you have some income (money goes in) and expenses (money goes out). Provided your numbers are right, you can take out loans to get more money now and agree to pay back money on some schedule (e.g. mortgage payments). Likewise, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble digging yourself into a debt hole that only some sort of legal action (bankruptcy, gov't forgiving college loans, etc) can free you from.
What's totally backwards is that the things that might count as sensible for what you do might be the exact opposite of what the really rich (and therefore powerful) people of this world do.
For instance, it is a pretty safe idea to not spend money you don't have via avoiding debts for most people, most of the time. Exceptions can be made for some stuff like taking out a mortgage with a low interest rate to start a family home if you don't have tons of cash to hand over immediately.
Yet the operating principle of our currency is doing lots of borrowing—the US Dollar isn't tied to economic activity (look at how much stuff has slowed down this past year, yet stock prices are higher than ever). Our political leaders can choose to support and fund ideas pretty much nobody would want to give any money to through financial vehicles you and I do not have access to. Regardless of whether or not you like how US Dollars work, you're compelled to pay taxes in US Dollars. There is no "social contract"; you are coerced to operate within a system that is not of your design and choosing.
Not doom-spiraling
The point of this post isn't to complain and "doom spiral", but rather to highlight the fact that one of the main metrics by which people today measure success is a very broken measuring stick.
A similar example would be fame. Do people become famous because they are of good character and have lots of talent? Anyone who is seriously into some skilled thing (such as guitar playing or oil painting) will likely tell you that there are many famous things that are over-rated while other lesser known things that are under-appreciated. While there is a subjective aspect to this, it goes without saying—being a "better" musician doesn't mean the "free market" proportionally rewards you.
It would be wrong to base how we think we're doing on a broken measuring stick like wealth; a person with a 1 million dollar "net worth" isn't 10 times better than a person with an 100k "net worth". Indeed, the personw ith an 100k net worth might be a contributing member of society, providing valuable services while the person with 1 million dollars net worth might be sitting on their butt sipping mojitos and getting cheeto crumbs on your couch.
Leftoids correctly give critiques of how big bad billionaires get into power through capitalism first, and then monopolizing stuff and putting anti-competitive laws into place.
But the Rightards also correctly point out how the problem isn't capitalism itself (which I'll understand as "economic freedom").
Really, as a society, I think most people want the same thing—a large degree of economic freedom without overly bigly doing wealth inequality. Sure, we'll always have more rich and more poor people (we need these differences so richer people can be charitable, so we can organize labor, etc). But this isn't so much of a problem if even working class people can have a reasonable standard of living (and not be enslaved by debt).
Off-the-spectrum thinking
The stuff above isn't to say "we should do something in the middle of what Republicans and Democrats" say. Ha! Surely you don't think Democrats represent "the left" and Republicans represent "the right", and you can just be a reasonable person and choose something "in between"?
We're not measuring flour to bake cookies here.
A more useful approach, I think, is to look at what tools/instruments (including financial ones) are available, and how we should (not) allow these things to be used, if at all.
So, for instance, there's this thing called credit. Lots of people would like to use it. What sort of uses are proper for it? Should you be able to get some naïve person signed up on some horrible contract that gets them enslaved for life? I would argue that our lawmakers should protect people from stuff like this. You can buy a shovel, but you will get in trouble if you hit someone on the head with a shovel. This doesn't mean shovels are bad, that only specialists should be allowed to use shovels, etc.
The whole "right" vs "left" dialectic is annoying because it gets people to say, "you are either Karl Marx or Ayn Rand". Well, bucko, did you know that a clever commie would say let the capitalists build up stuff and then seize the means of production? To think in terms of "left vs right" is to be an early stage or late stage utopian. And that doesn't work.
What I think is more important to understand is to see what tools are available to us and how to best use those—for each individual this will be different. This IS NOT a nihilist perspective; it is just to say that I don't think you can have a purely "secular" moral system based on ideas like "muh free market" or even some hand-wavy, vague notion like "human rights" which corresponds to what some club of globalists find out makes you feel good from their decades of research into social engineering.