Recovery with what?

Paul Craig Roberts has been a voice crying in the wilderness for the better part of a decade, first about gutting the American industrial economy and then about the immoral, ruinous wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes today about an economic question few people have even framed, much less considered: What if there is no recovery?

To date, just about everybody in government and business assumes that no matter how severe is the depression into which the US has fallen, we will somehow "recover" at some unspecified future date for equally unspecified reasons. The hidden assumption is that "recovery" will be a restoration of the pre-crash prosperity. Since the pre-crash prosperity was a financial bubble created by the Fed's insane credit and monetary expansion, this assumption is plainly absurd. Nonetheless, that's what American government, business, and people in general are banking on.

Paul Craig Roberts will have none of this. This depression is not a pause on the journey to ever greater prosperity, he argues. It is a collapse, a fall into an impoverishment from which there will be no future escape. This depression, in short, is our permanent future. Once we were rich; now we are poor. We have wrecked our economy and destroyed the industrial infrastructure that would have enabled us to recover. We now have nothing to recover with. We refuse to see our predicament. We believe ourselves entitled to prosperity; we deserve it; it's our birthright. The rest of the world thinks that you earn prosperity. That's why we Americans are in it up to our necks. Happy New Year!

Read it here