The economy and the culture at large that we were all born into places the highest possible value on the concept of Maximize. The most obvious philosophical question about the proliferating roster of Billionaires is why the fuck do you want your second billion dollars?

Because two is more than one. Three is more than two -- as we march toward the first Trillionaire as a thousand billions is better than 999.

With Maximization the highest value, this madness is perfectly logical.

So, give everybody some slack -- permission to live your life rather than racing forever against the rest of the rats of the world.

I think this is a better answer to the challenge of capitalism than 19th Century materialist theory explicating the Class Struggle. We are all in this together, whether we like it or not.

...on what passes for modern economics.

I especially welcomed the author's conclusion because it is so blatantly obvious, but — due to the Gaslighting of the American people — it is sailing right over their heads. I hope the perils of gaslighting will be the takeaway from this historical transition and its aftermath.

This general cluelessness should leave the rest of us some 'slack' to prepare and mobilize. Long live slack.

Most of my readers will probably know the catchphrase “Collapse now, and avoid the rush!” It’s a good summary of what I’ve been suggesting, but, er, there’s one little problem: if you really want to get ahead of the rush you may not have much time left.

I spoke at the beginning of this post about the drool-spattered idiocy that passes for political and economic policy these days. The costs of such vagaries are by no means abstract. For the last half century, the relative prosperity of the industrial world has rested on a strict if tacit agreement on the part of all major industrial countries that politics and economics were to be kept separate. No matter how sharply the United States and China quarrelled over the status of Taiwan, say, the flow of products and investment between the two countries was sacrosanct. Love it or hate it — and it had as many downsides as upsides — that agreement was what backstopped the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency and medium of international trade, and provided a great deal of slack for a global economy that tolerably often needed as much slack as it could get.

The countries in yellow have sanctioned Russia. The ones in gray have not. Who’s isolated?

.

Those days are now over. By turning the global economy into a military asset to use against Russia, the Biden administration and its European allies have given notice to every other country on the planet that they cannot allow themselves to remain dependent on the dollar, or on US-centric economic institutions, unless they want to be forced into subservience. That’s why nobody in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or southern Asia has signed onto the sanctions against Russia; it’s why India is now negotiating with Russia and Iran to buy their fossil fuels using local currencies, leaving the dollar high and dry; it’s why Venezuela is talking about adopting the Russian Mir credit card and money transfer system, and why Saudi Arabia has signaled that it’s going to start pricing some of its oil in yuan. That means in turn that the era of economic globalization is over, and those countries that profited most from that era now stand to lose everything they gained.

Yes, the United States is at the top of that list. This country was cut an immense amount of slack by the dollar’s status as reserve currency and medium for international trade: by some estimates, the equivalent of a trillion dollars a year in direct and indirect economic subsidies. Unless something changes drastically, that’s going to go away in the near future, with consequences that will leave our economic and political system in tatters. You may want to cut yourself plenty of slack in your own life, dear reader, because we may be in for quite a wild ride in the months and years immediately ahead.

.

The history of government and media lies in the US should be taught in every school.