The setup of the current economy is very efficient and effective. Unfortunately, what it is exceptional at is concentrating wealth into a decreasing number of hands, by extracting value in a myriad ways from the majority, reducing the ability to grow or causing retraction from the ground up, in order to create an ever-heightening peak. The spread of wealth is decreasing and as the base destabilizes, the peak will get precarious.
And that destabilization is already being felt in numerous ways economically and socially and it is going to become more pronounced the longer the system is in effect. The last year has seen a phenomenal increase in the growth of the peak and narrowing of the base, as governments globally have supported the wealth transfer through borrowing on the future and supporting those who already have, either directly or indirectly. The direct support is through bailouts and protections as well as tax reductions. The indirect is through the handouts that have been spent on consumption products that have a diminishing value over time, rather than a generative one.
While people are happy they got a new TV paid for "by the government" (tax money borrowed from the future), that TV cost 1/10th of the cost to manufacture and the majority of the difference went into the hands of a multinational conglomerate of some kind, one that doesn't likely come close to meeting its true tax obligations, which are already lower than that of the normal employee.
What people don't seem to realize when they bought that TV is that they are going to have to pay it back, plus interest, in the future. It wasn't free, the true cost just hasn't been realized yet. What has effectively happened is that the governments have given trillions of dollars out, knowing that with everyone trapped at home and local businesses shuttered, there are only a handful of places that wealth is going to be spent and with the way business works globally, it will pool in even fewer hands. What this means is that the governments can say "we did our best" to put money where it was needed, but in actual fact it was just a station stop on the way to the intended destination - the pockets of the super-wealthy.
But, it is also these kinds of processes that have caused some people to wake up to the situation and start transferring their own wealth. The difference is that rather than transferring into those centralized shitcoins of fiat, it is heading onto the tokenized blockchains of Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs and DeFi products. While it is just a trickle for now, the more wealth that moves over to blockchains, the greater the speed of destabilization of the traditional economy becomes, splitting the future building of business development across two economies, the old and the new, with the old still holding a great deal of old wealth, but the new offering capabilities unseen before and a maturing market of participants who have increasingly been muscled out of the benefits of the old.
Many young people today will increasingly struggle for economic availability in the old economy, they will not be able to get stable jobs and even if they do manage to fight the consumer urge, they will still not be able to collect enough to become owners, as the old guard have cemented their place and built walls of legislation and process to protect them.
Rather than fight to get over the walls, more will just abandon the castle of the old economy all together and this will result in a decreasing amount of new energy to come in at the foundation level and keep the towers standing. They will understand the game is rigged, so will transfer their wealth to a field of play where there is the opportunity for a more balanced game to take place - the blockchains, the tokenized economies and the rewarded activities that they find valuable for their lives, in a more distributive and sensitive way.
We are rapidly moving in the direction of both economic calamity and salvation simultaneously, we have a problem that is degrading the conditions and a solution that is improving them. If we are looking at most problems the world faces, we are actually in a pretty good situation, as there is a solution to our woes and it is even being adopted.
Just think about the decades it took to start thinking about the environment and how far behind we still are and then, look at how fast the process of economic replacement is happening. We are lightyears ahead and this is partially because we are leveraging past technologies, just using them in different ways. A phone is no longer a communication device, it is a computer and a hub for interaction and now - a bank, a value generator, a tool for granular investment at speed for anyone on earth. These types of technologies have been used for granular societal control, now they are being commandeered by the slaves to enable their financial freedom.
The change in wealth flows might seem insignificant at the moment in comparison, but it is much like a trickle of water that becomes a small stream under a heavily reinforced wall - the ground softens and gaps are created and at some point, the weight of the wall collapses on itself, as the foundation is no longer robust enough to maintain the weight.
While they might be rudimentary, all the tools to fundamentally improve the financial world and the societies it enables are available, it just needs more people to use them. The generations coming through the ranks now, have been conditioned to use them all from birth. Will they be economic wall breakers, or will they choose to continue to throw themselves against the stones, hoping for a different result than those who tried before them, becoming the very foundation that supports them?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]