Endless Economic Growth Cannot Be Sustained In America

By Frosty Wooldridge

Economist Kenneth Boulding said, “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”

The same can be applied to an obese 450 pound person.  The fatter he or she becomes, the sooner he or she dies.  Over 1.5 million heart attacks annually attest to that reality in America.

Each week, we watch the declining or stagnant Dow Jones stock figures. We wonder why we haven’t jumped out of our recession.  We feel confused that the great American economic engine hasn’t brought us back to full employment and endless financial wealth.

As will be discovered in the months and years ahead, we have hit the zenith, the peak, the top—and it’s all a degree of downhill from now on out.  As Boulding said, the more people we must feed, the more we must house, the more we must water and the more we must transport—the faster our decline.

It’s astounding to me, an average citizen, that our leaders cannot understand our predicament.  It’s shocking that we fail to put two and two together.  With 14 million unemployed, we import 125,000 workers every 30 days to offset any gains in employment.  That faulty path leads to a deeper problem.

“Our solution is our problem,” said Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,”. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”

In other words, we must change our economic system.  We need to move toward a stable population and steady state economics. (www.SteadyState.org)

In this five video, you will see HOW much financial trouble we face:

 http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/EW5IdwltaAc?rel=0

As you can see, essentially, our collision course is set and our paralyzed Congress cannot grasp or take action to solve it.  It is now only a matter of time and our personal response.

“It could implode in a few weeks, in a few months or maybe in a few years,” Heinberg said, “but unless radical steps are taken to restructure the economy, it will implode. And when it does the financial system will seize up far more dramatically than in 2008. You will go to the bank or the ATM and there will be no money. Food will be scarce and expensive. Unemployment will be rampant. And government services will break down. Living standards will plummet. ‘Austerity’ programs will become more draconian. Economic inequality will widen to create massive gaps between a tiny, oligarchic global elite and the masses. The collapse will also inevitably trigger the kind of instability and unrest, including riots, that we have seen in countries such as Greece. The elites, who understand and deeply fear the possibility of an unraveling, have been pillaging state resources to save their corrupt, insolvent banks, militarize their police forces and rewrite legal codes to criminalize dissent.”

In the coming months, Romney and Obama need to get down to brass tacks. Right now, both of them fool themselves and us. They need to come up with a plan to act on our $16 trillion debt.  If they don’t, Greece’s example at less than 30 million citizens will be multiplied times 300 million Americans. 

Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous that they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

Therein lies our predicament. The people who got us into this nightmare keep thinking they can get us out with the same kind of thinking that got us into it. Instead, they transform a nightmare into a living nightmare.

In other words, sooner or later, by working with the old economic concepts, we can only face collapse.  Whether we like it or not, we need to raise taxes, cut benefits,  stop deficit spending on military, trade and welfare, stop growing our population by 3.1 million annually and pay down our debt.

As our second president John Adams said in 1826, “There are two ways to conquer & enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” 

##

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as eight times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. In 2012, he bicycled coast to coast across America.  His latest book is: How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World by Frosty Wooldridge, copies at 1 888 280 7715/ Motivational program: How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World by Frosty Wooldridge, click:

www.HowToLiveALifeOfAdventure.com