We are now deluged with discussion of "retirement" as a personal, not a national concept.
Let's put things in perspective. The best security for an aging, human atom is to establish and help maintain coordination among the 10x Trillion atoms inside a typical human cell.
The best security for an aging liver cell is to help establish and help maintain coordination among the 10xTrillion cells and ~60 organs making up the typical human physiology.
The same holds for any single person among the ~320 million residents inside the USA.
How do WE organize on a bigger scale? What are the unimaginable returns we could reap if we'd just all work together? We have a long way to go to match previous organizational achievements. We're not even getting started, folks. Could we stop this evolving train, even if we wanted to?
Thinking ONLY as isolated individuals is obviously not the solution.
This is NOT a difficult concept to comprehend. Life-cycle utilization of aging components in an organized, GROWING AND EVOLVING system is a trivial task - IF all components just work together. Teamwork makes progress and growth incredibly easy for team members. That's why "social" atoms, molecules, cells and species evolved, and why teams work. Call it the return-on-coordination.
The opposite - team members ONLY parasitizing one another - only leads to dissolution of teams and nations, and loss of the original return on coordination - which is the highest return, BY FAR. This is 2nd nature to all kids converging on a playground, or huddling around a game. What are we doing to remove it by the time they're adults? Our real goal is to drive adaptive SELECTION at all levels, from local to national ... and then to mold mold them into NET, not random, adaptive selection. That requires a lot of connections and interactions. More than none, and less than too many. But how many in any given context? There's no pat answer, other than "just enough," but working teams can easily figure that out on a daily basis, if they try. Even large electorates can do this easily, but only if they at least try.
What happened to our founders original goal of a thinking electorate capable of selecting a thinking policy staff?
Instead, we're faced with with a flood of randomly distracting messages, like the following.
Every $5 worth of food stamps generates $9 back into the economy.
Seems to me that the whole article falls into the trap of being confused, divided & conquered, by unnamed opponents who are getting us to promote our own demise. Those opponents might even be ourselves, purely by accident! For Pete's sake! Instead of being distracted, divided and conquered by the mass of disorienting details in this story, please briefly ignore those details, and instead ask a simple question about context.
What Desired Outcome is this discussion implicitly embracing?
A strategy for an undefined SOME of us, to live off a "stabilized" serf class?
The whole discussion drifts towards an abstract view the US Middle Class as a commodity, somewhat like cattle on their way from Kansas stockyards. However, the new slaughterhouses are on Wall St., not in Chicago.
Why is this even happening? Where does this view come from? Partly because of the highly publicized - and highly abstract - economist's myth of "equilibrium" in an evolving system?
Doesn't that make you wonder who finds it convenient to SELECT economists who spout such nonsense? When all you have is a parasitic ... er, aristocratic outlook, every policy question looks like a question of ruling? By idiosyncratic Central Planning? Regardless of whether the commodity SOME have targeted for domestication involves sheep, cattle, serfs or even our former Middle Class?
For us "commodities," it doesn't matter whether we were targeted innocently or purposefully by those who think they are destined to rule. Either way, we need to refuse to go on the journey to the financial slaughterhouse others have selected for us. Stop cooperating with those targeting you, and start playing team ball with YOUR teammates in the former Middle Class.
That's how we can ALL retire while seamlessly rebuilding, not looting, our nation, and enjoy every step of that journey too.
The whole failure of Central Planning is that the perspective from yesterday's context is never sufficient to avoid mistakes in tomorrow's, bigger context. Only with constantly increasing perspective can further adjustments continue, sooner, rather than later. Adaptive adjustments are those based on expanding perspective. All other team adjustments - individual or group - tend, by definition, to be random actions, mostly maladaptive.
So why are we still drifting back to Central Planning, this time under the guise of capitalism? We can't see the context for all the fees we're charging one another?
There is a better way. We have the tools of democracy. Let's just use them. Once perspectives are broadened and stimulated to at least LOOK at our constantly changing and EXPANDING context, an element of doubt is possible. Those doubts about how we're navigating through a CHANGING situation are the only thing that keep any evolving system alive.
Without an adequate fraction of nagging doubt about all actions AND their growing connectivity, we don't re-examine our increasingly complex systems.
And if we don't re-examine emerging outcomes, and actually assess what we're seeing? Well, then don't be surprised if outcomes don't steer towards what YOU recognize as survival - for you, your kids, your neighborhood or your entire nation.
That's how we end up even dwelling - so much - on the occurrence of mal-adaptive things that clearly have no public purpose.
Take the following series, as another complement to Bill Black's scathing review of banksters, their lobbyists, and the "policy staff" which "we" SELECT to let them buy.
How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part I in a Series
How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part II in a Series
How To Steal A Lot Of Money (Part III In A Series)
How many ignored messages DOES it actually take, to make the US electorate actually wake up and re-examine what they really want?
Not mention their actual process for SELECTING their own, national policies that steer us to those outcomes?
Nor our methods for SELECTING the policy staff they task with delivering those Desired Outcomes.
The ball is distributed all over our court. We have 320 million players on our team. Can we organize this team to achieve what we want to achieve? How soon can we mobilize to do that? Before it's too late?
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