Amerika

In theory, socialism means that the workers own the means of production; in reality, it translates into workers being shareholders in the entire economy, and compensated regardless of performance. With the rise of decentralized totalitarian states like the contemporary EU/US, socialism has been brought in through the backdoor via government action within a theoretically capitalist economy.

This government action takes two main forms: entitlement payments to citizens, and the regulatory state, which mandates that certain jobs by “created” in order to deal with paperwork. The entitlement payments fuel consumer spending and create demand for the currency, which is then used as a signifier of its value. Since that value is not tangible, frequent depressions and crashes result.

Currently those in the West are facing a massive consumerism bubble where the perceived value of our money is less than the actual value of what it represents, causing economic instability and a crash as that value is recaptured.

This means that many of our industries are entirely fake and consist of government forcing employment, perpetually “pump priming” the economy with social welfare payments, and then taxing the resulting money to keep the economy looking healthy. Now however we are starting to see the over-valued industries collapse:

As industry spending and debt servicing rage out of control, health care is ranked as the No. 1 US “systemic recession risk” in a new report. The sums at stake are staggering: Spending in the sector accounted for $3.3 trillion in 2015, and is 18 percent of the US economy today. The industry generates 16 percent of private sector jobs nationwide, up from 10 percent in 1990.

…The conventional wisdom points to US demographic trends, and an aging population, as supportive of the long-term strength, but the report shows industry growth has surpassed what is sustainable:

• Health care company debt is up 308 percent since 2009.
• The number of hospitals in health systems has expanded by 26 percent since 1999.
• The yearly medical costs for a family of four have jumped 189 percent since 2002, from $9,000 to $26,000.

The voters never seem to understand that politicians find “magic” solutions by taking whatever is succeeding and bending it to the will of government, which then inflates its value and primes it for a crash. Consider education: the gateway the middle class was over-promoted, and now has devalued itself. Or the failing Dot-Com boom.

Consumerism “worked” for a brief period of time because of the postwar wealth and population booms. This created the manic salesman culture of the 1950s which drove anyone with a working mind away from civilization in general, and essentially punished the intelligent and sane for wanting normal lives instead of highly acquisitive ones.

Now that the wealth and population boom is over, we are replacing our citizens with foreigners in an attempt to produce new markets, and companies are seeing their margins shrink. Government regulation compounded this by “creating” many unnecessary jobs and legal expenses, and now the economy has been drained of vitality and is treading water to keep afloat. Not for long.

Tags: consumerism, crash, medicine, regulations