Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Don:


> Recently we had a discussion of the meaning of the economic bad news 
> flooding us

Apropos.

There is, says I, an underlying cause of all of this that many (of us) have 
been pointing out for years only to be greeted with blank stares as if we 
were 
warning about an impending attack by incubi or invasion from Pluto.

That is, we can't earn our collective living by washing each other's clothes. 
 We cannot shuffle papers from one side of a desk to the other, hook up each 
other's computers, coordinate and facilitate this and that ... and expect 
that 
it will result in food on the table and fuel in the tank.

It was expressed much better by Jim Kunstler thus:

" What all this comes down to is the sense of a nation absolutely fooling 
itself that it can carry on in the way it is used to. I'm hardly an advocate 
of 
the US giving up and committing suicide. What I advocate is a broad 
recognition 
that reality is compelling us to changeour behavior. Reality is trying to 
tell us that we can't run an economy based on nothing more than investment 
schemes without directing investment into activities that produce things of 
value."  
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Collectively there is a mentatlity that if we just make the right 
"investments" we can all live well without having to do anything.  Logic and 
reality 
tells us that this can only work for a very few people at a time.  If there 
is to 
continue to be eggs on the table at breakfast and tires for the truck, 
someone 
somewhere is going to have to continue working.

The present financial and economic situation, says I, is due to the large, 
large number of people who are holding onto, as the Simon & Garfunkel song 
said, 
"a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises" and think that means they have 
access to eggs and tires forever because of it.   Social security, pensions, 
401K's, stocks, and of late  "equity" in a house are all things based on 
someone's promise to deliver meaningful funds at some future date.  A great 
number 
of pensions and 401K's are backed by mortgates, the promise of homedebtors 
(what we used to call 'homeowners') paying the mortage over the next many 
years.

What if they can't?  And it's looking more and more now like they aren't 
going to be able to.  Sadder still are those who dumped all they had into an 
expensive home and larger by far than they needed with this plan:  Housing 
"values" 
just keep going up and up, so all my money will compound in the rising value 
of the house and when I retire, I will sell it at a huge profit and buy a 
much 
smaller one.  I'll then live off the difference for the rest of my life.  

But what happens if the value of the house goes down and stays down for 
twenty years? (Which is what's happening.)  Then these people are 
skeeeeee-roooooed!

I am still flaberghasted at the number of people with whom I talk who say 
they "took money out of their house" and don't understand that all they did 
was 
borrow money which has to be paid back.

If the news and numbers are to be believed, governments do not have the power 
to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

If, like a homesteader, the main and bulk of your prospertity comes from the 
produce and productivity of your homestead, and/or you earn your living 
producing something of real and tangible value, this economic downturn will 
affect 
you only little.

But if your prospects of prosperity, or even solvency, comes from "a pocket 
full of mumbles, such are promises", disaster lurks.


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