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| Economy |
| We're Not Finished |
| 2023-06-13 |
| [Kunstler] If you’re wondering why our country is lost in lunatic raptures of lawless Lawfare and futile MAGAry, it’s because our economy has already collapsed, and our culture and politics with it downstream have also collapsed into spectacular degeneracy. It has already happened. Maybe you don’t know it. The business model is broken. We’re a shadow of the industrial economy that won a great war and enjoyed a boisterous peace. You can’t replace ball bearing factories with theme parks and hedge funds. Sorry. The full faith and credit of the USA is not embodied in those frivolities, so our money is losing its mojo fast. But get this: we will go on. This is not the end of the world or the end of history. It is the end of an era. Believe it or not, the economy will fix itself, it just won’t be what it was in 1957. It won’t be what the techno-supremacists think, either. (You need a dependable electric grid to run all those server farms and the apps they serve, and the AI supposedly looming.) It will fix itself because when things fail, as they are doing now, a lot of opportunities will open up to do things differently, even very differently. When the chain stores fail along with their twelve-thousand-mile supply lines, Americans will figure out how to find stuff, make stuff, move stuff, and sell stuff at a smaller scale, maybe back on your Main Street (if it’s still there). There will be a lot less stuff, of course. But it may be enough stuff, and some of you will be busy making stuff of some kind. Imagine an economy where practically everybody has a useful role to play. Do you know how much more important it is to lead a purposeful, active life than to be lost in leisure and anomie with more stuff than you know what to do with? Which is where we’re at now, even for many who are statistically "poor." When the Happy Motoring colossus tweaks out, we’ll spend less time moving around and more time doing useful things, staying put around the places where we live. We’d be lucky if we could keep some railroads going, but the prospects are not great for that now. Sorry, we blew it. Should have re-started that project in 1970 when the handwriting was on the wall. (We made a lot of bad choices.) Cars and trains require elaborate networks of many interdependent technologies all integrated smoothly at the giant scale — oil, steel, plastics, electronics — and all of that is disintegrating. Pretty soon, you can forget about airplanes, too. That leaves... what? Yes, boats and horses. I know... it sounds inconceivable. Wait for it. When our grotesque medical racketeering matrix fails, doctors will practice medicine at smaller scale, probably without advanced pharmaceuticals and techno-diagnostics. They’ll open small local clinics while zombies squat in the broken mega-hospitals. You’ll have to pay in cash, whatever form that comes in. You’ll have to take care of yourself, too, but there will be a whole lot less enticing, engineered, toxic crap available to stuff into your body — Froot Loops, Hot Pockets — and the food markets won’t be all that super. There will certainly be less food altogether, but there will be fewer of us to feed, and more of that fewer-of-us will be busy producing that food, one way or another. That’s the reality I see coming. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 2027, the SHTF. |
| Posted by: Enver Slager8035 2023-06-13 14:34 |
| #5 I think Knunstler might be assuming the level of collapse is uniform and world-wide. If not, a whole host of potential colonial powers might find the natural resources and farmland of North America of great interest. Like the Gallic Wars, it will be messy, but if they know how to use the classic Roman tactic of selective alliances to balkanize Nebraska against Illinois, it might make a great future version of De Bellico Gallia? (it might look like this: 高卢战争) |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2023-06-13 11:39 |
| #4 If you remember the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, it was infrastructure collapse, (a telephone line going down) as a result by gummint / industry misfeasance that started the whole story rolling. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-06-13 08:04 |
| #3 We had railroads before electricity. An indirect effect of that period was Standard Time, as routes had to be coordinated to avoid unfortunate meetings somewhere on the tracks. Railroads will still provide mass transportation of goods and, if necessary, people. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-06-13 08:00 |
| #2 You can’t replace ball bearing factories with theme parks and hedge funds. Sorry. The globalist nocternal emission raises it's ugly head. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-06-13 07:08 |
| #1 Uplifting. Will theee still be satan lite television for me to watch sports or will I have to revert to cable? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2023-06-13 06:45 |