"Running the printing presses day and night to churn out dollar bills is not going to revitalize the economy. At is most basic level every economy is about dealing with the “dust from the ground” of which we are made, with the rocks and soil of this planet. We aren’t like God, able to create ex nihilo; we aren’t angels who can sustain ourselves on “information.” The real stuff that makes an economy hum is fished or grown or mined. It is taking the raw materials of this earth, “by the sweat of your face,” and making it edible, wearable, or otherwise usable to some other human being that forms the basis of any economy. When we see growth there, that is when we will be back."
It reminds me of the maxim I learned in the fifties that all wealth is created by farming, fishing, mining, and manufacturing. All other industries or vocations merely served those wealth generating ones. Then in the late eighties, Everyone began to say that this was the Information Age and we no longer depended on that old maxim. At the same time, we began transforming farming into massive Agri-business enterprises that relied on government handouts and practically eliminated the family farms, began allowing other countries to fish our coastal waters without protest, began denigrating mining as environmentally harmful, and began shipping our manufacturing overseas. Those Everyones ignored the fact that computers and information technology was a form of manufacturing although they quickly began shipping all those related services overseas also.
We were lulled into thinking that because bankers and investment advisors were wealthy themselves, that they were creating wealth for our country's economy. Then last September, as it collapsed, that empire showed itself to be a mere house of cards as our personal wealth collapsed with it.
I pray that we have the will to rebuild the US economic base.
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