Living In These Modern Times & Trying To Keep Perspective

Recently, I had an email exchange with the CEO of a toy and model company. It was basically pleasant banter of sorts. I wrote to the company with my concern that they were going to price themselves out of existence; some of the model kits they are selling are very overpriced, especially compared to imports. He replied that production costs for the workers in the plant works out to almost $20 an hour including benefits, and this simply for the people working the dies.

If this sounds familiar it's because Detroit has made similar remarks about their employees.

While I'm not sure of the risks associated with working injection molding equipment, I do know the risks associated with manufacturing a car are surely magnitudes greater, which is why an autoworker can demand greater pay, even if they aren't in a union.

But plastic models are not cars, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Ironically, the fastest growing fields of employment in this country are in areas where there are no real tangible products, aside from one. This has been in financial, insurance and real estate, the so called FIRE economy. Aside from the latter (real estate), there are no real products being manufactured. Ultimately, the bulk of the FIRE economy has been the movement of data from one institution to another, of inflating one set of numbers and agreeing that another set was either going to increase or decrease. This may have been based upon some real products being moved or produced, but in the end it is all simply numbers, an agreed upon insanity that has gripped our economy for the past three decades.

This insanity has spread to almost all walks of life; we expect more, it seems. We want our slice of the pie, even if minimal effort has been applied. The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness has meant, frequently, that we have had to sell our very souls to ideas that we once would have found repugnant, even repulsive. In the end, we justify those feelings as simply the costs of living and staying ahead.

Staying ahead. Competition. Pretty much what it is really all about too often, isn't it?

We wanted to stay ahead of our neighbors, and for a long time that seemed to be the name of the game. Now, thanks to a lifestyle that had us behave more like racehorses not people, many of us find ourselves trying to stay ahead of the wolves, those forces that seek to undo the lives we have made.

Thanks to that idealistic notion of the American Dream, we have nearly bankrupted a nation, and not just financially.

Morally.

Why is it not enough to simply have enough?

Because it is bad for the economy that we had produced. We are a consumer oriented society, and a lifestyle that emphasizes "enough", or God forbid "less", runs counter to that notion. We openly mock people who choose lifestyles that are perhaps austere as being backward and Luddite. People who choose to ride bicycles over driving, or if they drive a used small car. People who choose to live in tiny houses and apartments. People who have ditched their televisions. We look upon them as quaint and awkward and not really fitting in.

But maybe there is a voice in our heads saying that perhaps they are more right than we realize.

During the nineteenth and going into the twentieth century, many practitioners of the still young art of economics had a tendency to base many economic models on physics. This certainly seems logical enough, on the outset. Of course, in the end it was a failed idea due to the fact that the economy is a social construct and as such can be manipulated far easier than one can manipulate the law of gravity, for instance.

If we must base our belief in an economy following a model closer to physics, here's an idea that nobody seems to remember.

The second law of thermodynamics.

This law states, basically, that everything decays. Energy can only be lost, not gained, and over time, complex systems break down. Entropy, friends and neighbors, is defined as order collapsing into chaos.

Welcome to our world.

How do we overcome this? I haven't a clue. I'm not going to break out a chalkboard and draw figures and connect dots and pretend I know, as some pundits have. The fact is that our economy, indeed our society, is simply a mass agreement. It is not based on reality, let alone physics. It is based on human nature; ever changing, subject to whims and trends and God knows what.

It is that last fact that those in power are all too aware of.

The ones who actually hold the monetary reins are all too aware that this house of cards that they have produced could collapse if the populace should suddenly wake up and realize that they have all been collectively had. The past thirty years years have seen the largest redistribution of wealth in this country's history, all of it towards the upper few percent. We may be the wealthiest nation in the world, but that wealth is concentrated, and insanely so, at the top.

In short, trickle down economics became tinkle upon economics. This, my friends, is the very definition of plutocracy, rule by the rich.

When a simple medical operation is enough to send most American families into bankruptcy. When we keep sending jobs overseas and laying off workers here. When public schools are forced to lay off teachers while enrollment grows. When it becomes painfully obvious that the United States is well on its way to becoming a third world country with pockets of modest prosperity. When something that used to cost $5.95 suddenly jumps to $15.00.

I could go on with the "whens". It'd be insane to. But there is one more "when", and that is when are we going to wake up from this fugue and pull ourselves out of this morass? Or are we going to continue along this path as long as we are forced fed and willingly consume our daily bread and circuses that keep our minds mushy and the powerful assured of their lofty perches?

Trying to keep this in perspective is an exercise in futility, because sadly the perspective shifts. I understand and emphasize with many viewpoints. It'd be better or simple enough to say that we are all collectively screwed as long as this continues.

And from where I sit, I see this only getting worse.