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Our society is on the cusp of disorder, chaos, mass suffering. At least according to many doomers (“we’re screwed”) and peak oil websites. Also many people I have talked to who are afraid of changing the status-quo industrialized mass society use similar imagery to describe the likely ensuing social breakdown.
It has been known for some time that the Social Security fund was inadequate to cover the retirement of the baby boomer generation. However, the recent unemployment spike–now at 5.1 million without work–has moved the insolvency of the Social Security fund to next year.
For some time the Social Security fund actually ran a surplus and the US government borrowed this surplus to fund other programs (like military and bailouts). Now that this will be gone, they will have to resort to printing more dollars and selling more US treasuries to not only cover the programs that were funded by the surplus in Social Security, but also to pay for Social Security itself.
So why does this matter? As the recent bailouts–now reaching $13 trillion–show the government can continue just borrowing money and paying it back later, right?
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A very interesting thread on the forums of the Permaculture Research Institute prompted me to think about profiting off others. Echoing some of the “leaders” in the permaculture movement, most posters saw nothing inherently wrong with profit, as long as it was used for doing good like “ethical investing” and “giving back.” Besides, many of them said, it’s impossible to live without profit. I thought it was curious that people who claimed it’s possible on a societal level to actually live sustainably with nature suddenly became fatalistic and considered other changes too far a stretch of the imagination.
