Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainYooh
Switzerland says hello. Its citizens, on average, don't spend much, do invest a lot, own their real estate and have smaller consumer debt as compared to other developed countries. Plus, their taxes are amongst the lowest in developed countries. And their economy is in great shape.
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So we'll all just lend money to each other and make watches and cough drops? You can definitely take a tiny economy like Switzerland's and just scale that up to fit any situation. Just like socialism must work because it does in Norway.
Back here in North America, we've built a machine that runs on debt, and lots of it. The rich are those that supply the debt, and take their cut of the debt, and come up with schemes to make companies of X value be worth X*Y in debt, and leverage debt to take on more debt to buy something of value that someone else goes into even more debt to buy and artificially inflate that something's value.
Enough debt is around that, incidentally, good ideas get funded and some companies actually make products. Then upper management figures out how to sell out to a bigger company (that takes on more debt to do so) and cash in their stock options, which are, incidentally, more or less another kind of debt.The products, of course, need to be sold to someone in order to preserve at least the appearance of a sustainable economy, and so consumer debt is made available to make sure that happens.
Nowhere in there is there room to stop creating and disseminating debt in favour of prudence and thrift. You might as well dream of a return to living off the land.