Digging a Deep Hole — The Fantasy of American Wealth
Americans have long celebrated their prosperity as a sure indicator of exceptional hard work, talent, skill, and ingenuity. Turns out it is mostly a function of easy access to credit.
The biggest growth industry in terms of dollars is the buying and selling of debt. Trillions of dollars of transactions are in play, at least until recently. The only problem is that the debt involved is largely disproportionate to the value of the assets, which that debt represents. This is the formula for financial collapse.
Americans have a great comfort level for living in debt. Their desire for conspicuous consumption means that Americans will fall for marketing ploys to "buy now — pay later". Everything from household furniture to wars are financed in this manner from the lowest citizen to the President of the United States. Wars of conquest are fought on credit, presumably to be paid for by some future generation of Americans.
Unfortunately, living in debt is like living in a hole in the ground. The farther in debt you get, the deeper the hole. The deeper the hole, the greater the reliance on further digging to find comfort in the process that put you in trouble to begin with. Americans are digging a massive hole for themselves — a hundreds of trillions of dollars hole. The hole is destined for collapse.
Most other people around the world have limited means, but they know how to live within their means. Americans long ago forgot the Biblical command : "Thou Must Not Covet". Americans covet everything all the time and have sold their future, plus the future of future generations of Americans to have what they covet now.
America was built under a different mindset/paradigm. Early entrepreneurs, industrialists, businessmen tended to be frugal producers of widgets who saved and produced and made profit, which they reinvested into their businesses. They became wealthy as a result of producing things of value. Today’s Americans have become consumers of debt, producers of little of real value, and increasingly vulnerable to collapse. And the tide of history has begun to turn with the peaking of worldwide petroleum output, the growth of competitor economies with well-educated and motivated engineers and businessmen who are not burdened with debt and who do not revile frugality and prudence as Americans do.
America’s wealth now is a fantasy because if you compare assets to debt, the wealth evaporates. Soon it will, and hundreds of billions of dollars of "wealth" have evaporated into thin air in the past week or two.
The media has taken no real notice of this, nor have the two mainstream political candidates. They blame a corrupt few, not a corrupt system, which they are both an integral parts of. American History will one day be taught at schools all over the world as the prime example of fantasy wealth and how to turn a huge fortune into a big hole. In just a couple of hundred years the vast natural resources of America have been squandered, the lives of countless victims of empire extinguished, and finally, the Empire itself collapses under its own weight.
