What if our economic woes were something symptomatic about a deep dysfunction many Americans refuse to contemplate. What if Thomas Friedman has it about right when he suggests that our infinite growth model inevitably leads to environmental/economic hell?
Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …
We can’t do this anymore.
"Watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a radical, a liberal, a fanatical criminal."
– Supertramp, "The Logical Song"
The idiots have been deriding the naysayers and getting their way for decades on many discussions because the ignorant public likes what ignoring reality gets them. Whether it's global warming, pollition, dangers caused by genetically modified foods, and now, the economic collapse, nobody wanted to hear it.
We're lucky that it could actually have been worse, total economic collapse that led to war or even nuclear war – the "If *I* can't have it, nobody else will get it!" antiphilosophy (because they are against thinking).
Such people are like morons driving a car at 100 MPH and saying, "The earth is flat, and this field goes on forever to the horizon!" while they're actually driving toward a cliff, which is why it looks so flat out there.