Atavism

Everyone is running around, shouting like crazy, the country is falling apart, oh no, blarrgggh! Would that it were. Uh, were that it would? I have been dreaming of a general social collapse for lo these many years, but no, no, this is not it. While I sympathize with John Cole, for instance, for his frustration that our national government and its media interlocutors remain mired in triviality while Rome burns, the truth is that Rome isn't really burning. It is not, god help us, an "existential threat," in the parlance of our times. We built a speculative bubble of debt-backed, over-leveraged investment. It's bursting. We used new home construction as a means of enrichment rather than . . . a means of expanding housing stock relative to growth in population. It's no longer feasible. We built cars on the assumption that our energy supply would never contract or get more expensive. It was a lousy assumption. So at the risk of callousness, let's call it all a correction.

Much as I'm sorry that the Bank of America is going to lay of ten gazillion workers as part of its impending merger, here's a hard fact: a full-employment model based on millions of pseudo-white-collar workers working in middle management is not tenable, no matter what Tom Friedman barfs up on any given . . . whatever day it is that he writes for the Times. Much as I regret that many autoworkers are going to lose their jobs in the near future, subsidizing failed corporate entities in order to avoid crafting a public provision for the newly jobless is not tenable. We may yet be moving toward an economy in which profits are generated by producing goods and offering services that people need to buy. Good lord, the sky is falling!