Amerika

We live in a world of zombies who cannot understand cause-effect relationships, or maybe simply refuse to think in those terms, preferring the safer worlds of categorical logic (means-over-ends) and social thinking where they can moralize and embellish but never must understand.

For example, currently there are literal millions of people speaking about the cost-of-living crisis… and yet only a handful mention that the real crisis is the monetary unit losing value because of our debt, taxes, high costs, and reckless spending.

Everyone wants the free stuff to be real, so they ignore its shortcomings, and they want a reason they can use to demand the free stuff, so they come up with mass poverty, and therefore they prescribe as a solution what is actually the cause of the problem.

Similarly, almost none will mention how early diversity — incorporating SEMI-euros into American life — essentially destroyed wage value such that now we can always get more, but never enough:

Year-over-year growth has mostly ranged between 2% and 3% since the beginning of 2013. But in the years just before the 2007-08 financial collapse, average hourly earnings often increased by around 4% year-over-year. And during the high-inflation years of the 1970s and early 1980s, average wages commonly jumped 7%, 8% or even 9% year-over-year.

After adjusting for inflation, however, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.

What happened in the middle 1960s? JFK created the welfare state, women entered the workdforce, and diversity was enforced by law. The Black vote became essential for winning political office. Massive social programs shifted our spending from external to internal issues.

All of these things arose from our need for equality as expressed through diversity. Without diversity, your currency would be worth quite a bit more. Now it is worth asking: why is everyone else still in denial?

Tags: diversity, inflation, wages