Things That Seem “Radical” in America Are Normal in Sane Countries
Things That Seem “Radical” in America Are Normal in Sane Countries
People need to step outside the bubble and realize how crazy things have gotten
My work has taken me to forty countries, 48 American states, and ten Canadian provinces.
Meanwhile, only 37% of Americans have a valid passport, and 38% have never had a passport.
Traveling widely gives you perspective:
It helps you realize that Canada is a cultureless and hyper-corrupt real estate pyramid scheme.
It helps you realize that Britain is still a feudal empire ruled by aristocratic sociopaths.
It helps you realize that most of Africa and Central America’s ongoing economic woes are due to corporate colonialism.
As Augustine supposedly said:
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
If this is true, then more than half of all Americans are culturally illiterate.
They don’t realize that America is simultaneously good, bad, and incredibly ugly.
And they especially don’t realize that things that seem unfathomably “radical” in America are actually totally normal in most sane countries.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Capped credit card fees
In America, businesses (and therefore consumers) are forced to pay a 2.9% tax (called a “transaction fee”) on every single credit card purchase.
Why?
Because Visa and Mastercard have a monopoly.
In Europe, that fee is capped at 0.2%.
Hyper-individualist Americans think it’s utter heresy to not let the rules-free-market (read: monopolists) decide on the maximum price of everything, but while Americans fork over $120 billion to credit card monopolies every year, Europeans get to sip more wine and eat more cheese, which actually creates more jobs instead of inflating property bubbles. Neat!
Cheaper healthcare for everybody
The writing is on the wall: As the costs rise, the population ages, the rich evade taxation, and the young can’t afford to shoulder the burden, corporatized healthcare will shatter the American economy.
While tens of thousands of Americans die from lack of corporate coverage and hundreds of thousands go bankrupt from corporate medical debt, the rest of the developed world laughs and shakes their heads because none of them have medical debt… and they all pay less per capita… for full coverage… for everybody.
Affordable post-secondary education
The corporatist mindset seeks to financialize everything, including access to knowledge.
(Note to self: The poor should bring a class action lawsuit against the Ivy League for monopolizing their network.)
While European nations invest in universities because it pays a 13X return on investment, American schools ensnare their graduates with $1.7 trillion in unbankruptable debt, ensuring they’ll waste their lives paying interest instead of creating more jobs by spending their hard-earned money into the economy.
Sensible protection from gun death
Americans are obsessed with gun “rights.”
Half of Americans care more about the right to carry an AR-15 than the right not to get shot by an AR-15.
How anti-human do you have to be to care more about the right to kill than the right to live?
How many more children have to be murdered to enrich retirees?
Do you know who has fewer murders per capita than America? Niger, Pakistan, Iran, Sierra Leone, and more than 100 other countries.
Americans suffer 6Xs higher gun deaths compared to Canada and sixty times higher gun deaths compared to the United Kingdom.
America has the 9th highest gun death rate in the world.
America has the 17th highest gun murder rate in the world.
America has the highest gun suicide rate on the planet.
Do you know who has lower gun death/murder/suicide rates?
Literally all the countries with laws that reasonably protect their citizens from guns.
Paid sick leave and 4+ weeks of annual rest from work
Americans are the only people on earth who have zero (0) federal or state statutory minimum paid vacation or paid public holidays.
When my wife and I switched continents from North America to Europe, we honestly didn’t know what to do with 28 paid weekdays off — after a decade of grinding fifty weeks a year, we simply didn’t know how to rest.
(Now we’re envying Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Spain, France, India, Djibouti, Benin, and Ukraine, all of whom give their people 36+ days off.)
Heck, even the Germans get 30 paid days per year.
After all, workers are the ones who create 100% of society’s wealth.
Now let’s flip this on its head
Those are just five ideas that seem “radical” to tens of millions of Americans but are commonplace to a billion other human beings.
For those of us who’ve traveled or lived outside America, we see how obvious and self-evident it is to cap credit card fees, make healthcare cheaper and available to everyone, not debt-slave our graduates, protect each other from machine guns, let sick people stay home from work, and take enough time off to not burn out.
And it makes you wonder:
What are five ideas that everyone believes are “radical” today that will be blindingly obvious to nearly everyone in the year 2100?
As you can imagine, Jared A. Brock has some ideas…
Debt jubilees
There’s only one way that ancient nations like Egypt and Babylon and Israel and Athens temporarily avoided spiraling into feudalism:
They declared debt jubilees.
It was basic, cold-headed, non-altruistic math: If the poor were completely debt-trapped and the rich monopolized everything, it would obviously crush the economy and destroy the nation.
So every time a new ruler came to power, he wiped out the debts, resetting the system so the former debtors could stop wasting their lives paying rent/usury/interest, and instead buy stuff, which created jobs, which created civilization.
A debt jubilee is how and why the defeated nation (Germany) recovered faster than the winner (Britain) after WWII.
Banning interest
It’s not enough to simply rescue everyone from the debt traps of creditors by declaring jubilees every decade or so.
It will be mathematically obvious to our great-great-great grandchildren that we simply have to get rid of interest altogether because it’s completely unsustainable.
They will come to understand clearly that interest is the ultimate inefficiency.
Banning for-profit land-lording
As we’ve established/reminded society, rent is usury and usury is devastating for society.
For-profit land-lording is pure theft, and there are exciting alternatives that future generations will heartily embrace, looking back on this vile feudalistic economic exploitation with disgust.
Wealth-taxing the hyper-elites
Once our descendants seize a firmer grasp of biological reality, they will understand that it is unfathomably stupid to allow infinite accumulation on a finite planet.
They will realize that in order to avoid the great reset to serfdom and save civilization from dictatorship, it will be necessary to ban rent-seeking and corporate profit-making on all human necessities and aggressively tax the rich to keep them from becoming oligarchs.
Paying for infrastructure without taxation or inflation
In the future, it will be obvious to communities that the solution for building commons infrastructure isn’t to crush the people with tax, print money and inflate the economy and rob the poor, or let corporations monopolize services for a mafia-high fee.
No, they’ll self-fund their own community and national assets using the revolutionary Daman Model.
In conclusion
Why are things the way they are?
What stops real human progress towards widest-spread longest-term wellbeing?
Clearly, the answer is: Us.
80% follow the status quo.
10% militantly defend the status quo.
10% actively oppose the status quo.
The first group is destined to be forgotten.
The second group is the most dangerous.
The third group is the most needed.
As the haunting union song asks: Which side are you on?
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