Toward an understanding of the American economy

I think it works along these lines, and if any insight is contained herein, I credit that in part to a recent trip abroad which confirmed the essential unlivability of even the First World at this point in world history.

America is the most desirable place to live on Planet Earth. The reasons for this are many and are related to the factors which made the United States preeminent in the first place. Favorable placement in the world's latitutdes, producing generally clement weather; a varied topography; lots of empty space; abundant resources; the inheritance of an advanced civilization. We have, for the most part, squandered all this, but we should not beat ourselves up about it. Humans are uniquely unsuited to the maintenance of beauty, and the mass production of ugliness is a general malaise of homo sapiens and not a strictly American characteristic. Other cultures produce ugliness as fast as they can, but they have, until recent times, lacked a comparable ugly-making technology.

It is said that America practices something called the New Economy, or the Information Economy, or the Post-Industrial Economy. These are stand-in terms for another way of looking at it, which is that we don't like doing dirty work anymore. The Hallucinated Economy is probably the most viable term at this point, where "wealth" is created through manipulation of paper instruments of debt, expansion of a money supply untethered to any standard (such as a precious metal) and a massive group psychosis. We pretend to envy countries like China which proliferate sweat shops and drudgery, but we don't, really. That's how we used to work in the old industrial towns of the Midwest, and upper Northeast and...well, just about everywhere. We didn't like the work then and we would hate it now. It is repetitive, difficult, soul-crushing work, as millions of young Chinese girls would affirm after a day of piecing together seams on NFL jerseys destined for Wal-Mart's leisure wear departments.

What was left after we decided to quit work? Well, it was kind of like the late stages of a losing game of Monopoly. You've got a lot of property cards, and a bunch of green houses, and a few red hotels. But you're low on cash, because you keep buying things (off the board, you could say) that you can't afford. You think you deserve them because everyone else has them, and the country's so...well, rich. Isn't it? The government assures us we are. The economy is booming, they say. So what's left? You don't want to work, or you lost the one job the United Auto Workers promised you'd have forever. So you borrow against those cards, those houses, those hotels. You refinance. That provides jobs to those who manipulate the money, who arrange the loans, who "appraise" your property, who "check" your credit, who bundle your loan with millions of others and make new "securities" out of them, which then are sucked into the dark vortex of the derivatives industry where they lose any resemblance to the simple transaction your loan once was. We take the money and head to the Big Box stores and buy stuff made in China. The line workers, the drudges, the wage slaves in China save astonishing fractions of their small earnings and live in crowded hovels dreaming of the day they can live like Americans. Their savings create a vast money pool which is loaned back to the USA, and the government issues IOUs to the Chinese and all our other creditors in the form of Treasury securities, T-bills, notes, bonds. The foreign creditors pretend that the cash-strapped American government can pay this money back, but the real security for their loans are all those green houses and red hotels. You are their security, your state of indenture to your own house where you derived all your "income" to buy hair dryers and an extension phone for every room.

Voila! The American economy. It is, strictly speaking, a psychological construct. It will exist so long as Americans and their slightly nervous creditors will it to exist. We shall mortgage the Great American Development to the hilt, to the max, to the roof to keep the game going.

Until, one dark day, it stops going altogether.