…and not just because I’m a young person with no assets.
The US is in what currently passes for dire economic straits, and our government is stepping in to preserve the current order and enable all of us to go about our happy consumer lives. That’s fine if you’re a cornucopian; I’m not. Some resources are not infinite and our economic growth is ultimately dependent on some of those non-infinite resources. There is a limit to how wealthy we can all be, and we will one day find out what it is.
That doesn’t have to be depressing, or even a problem, because I happen to believe that limit is pretty darn high. Life can be good for the foreseeable future. The problem is that my country’s economic system–and to a significant extent, the world’s–is based not on wealth but on the derivative of wealth.
I mean derivative like in Calculus — (d/d$)$$$ = 3$$. We are only wealthy to the extent that we are currently increasing in wealth. When our wealth is decreasing, even if we are still wealthy in absolute terms, things are terrible. We ensure that this continues to be the case by living high-class debtors’ lifestyles, buying houses we can’t afford (and thereby pricing those unwilling to do so out of the housing market) and making extensive use of questionable sources of credit. The Treasury Secretary has actually expressed a belief that our economy cannot continue to function without cheap consumer credit.
Bullcrap, I say. This is like saying that a person who takes out a $300 payday loan and “flips” it every two weeks at a net cost of $50 somehow continues to benefit from the process after the first two weeks.
I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing against credit. Credit can be a great thing and a great social equalizer, but an economy that depends on the abundance of credit is seriously deranged. There is very little incentive for fiscal responsibility in America today, and when our mostly-free market actually attempts to fix that problem on its own we insist on tinkering with it further.
3 Comments
No politician will ever criticise the debt-ridden lifestyle. but there isn’t really a whole lot they can do about the problems it causes. all they can do is put off the inevitable crash a bit more. people only care about the short-term over in yankee lan/
I think the telnet thing is messing up again..
It’s all one big ponzi scheme, let’s take over the banks so we can fund it. This will allow us to keep our rates artifitially low like the chinese (Socialism at it’s best). Perhaps the ultimate ponzi scheme because then we can print our own money, which will end up being worthless, after the inflation it will cause.
Statistically unemployment is at record levels, but only if you count the number of people unemployed, but as a percentage of the people it has a long way to go to match historic levels, inflation will rise to at least 20% like the Carter days.
Don’t you love how history repeats? Only this time we own the bank so we can print our way out, right? It’s all going to be interesting, expecially when you have a tax evader running the printing press. How much do you really think a dollar signed by Geitner will actually be worth.
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