A big part of writing is talking to readers about your book. Actually, in my opinion, the most interesting part of writing is about talking to readers about what they think about the world. As Phoenix Republic is a dystopian novel about a financial collapse of western culture, my discussions tend to be about what inspired me to write such a gloomy novel, or is something like what happened in Phoenix Republic really coming to America? I often answer by asking people to scan the headlines and ask themselves if what they see gives them a feel for life in America today. In the last couple of weeks we had some of the following headlines about stories that any one of which would have been earthshaking only a few years ago. Today they are more or less all happening all at one time. Here are just a few examples.
US Media Restricted at Border, Federal Agent Cites Safety Concerns
Bobby Jindal: ‘People Are Ready for a Hostile Takeover of Washington, D.C.’
Think about it, there are signs posted in some areas of the US where authorities actually inform American citizens that the area is dangerous to travel in. Tens of thousands of people are crossing our borders with no way to determine who they are. As a nation the US has spent trillions of dollars on Iraq, which now appears to be collapsing almost overnight. The Middle East could descend into civil war any day now.
If that happens, the price of oil will almost assuredly skyrocket. America burns 15 million barrels of oil a day while only producing 8 million barrels of oil a day. Obviously we are bringing in 7 million barrels of oil a day from other places. One of those places is the Middle East. Instead of Washington DC working feverishly to secure oil from Canada and to dramatically increase our own production, it is working to reduce our capability and has killed the keystone pipeline project. If war does break out, western nations will be in deep, deep trouble.
If this isn’t enough, consider that our National Debt is growing at an unsustainable rate. Think about it. Compare the percentage of GDP American leaders have committed us to now and what we were on the hook for just a few short years ago. Come on. Regardless of politics we all know this doesn’t work. It isn’t magic. If nothing else, think about it as if the numbers below were personal. If you had a relative that borrowed $1,000 dollars on a credit cards every month in 2008 and were now borrowing $1,700 dollars a month today, or 99% of what they earned, you would think they were completely delusional and would be thinking about intervening. Regardless of the scale of the problem, it is the same paradigm.
2008 $10,000,000,000,000, or about 68% of America’s GDP
2014 $17, 000,000,000,000 or about 99% of America’s GDP
Where am I going with this? I will tell you. In my opinion, our country is too broken in too many places to ever fix unless we can find a way to address our issues honestly very soon. As I have written about in other articles, there are two Americas. We are dangerously divided and sadly, this is our biggest challenge.
In 2008 the economy came dangerously close to collapsing because crony capitalism / crony socialism is failing. The federal government encourages people to spend foolishly and lenders are more than happy to borrow money at zero percent interest and loan it out risk free to borrowers. Prior to 2008, Wall Street was all about selling mortgage derivatives which basically amounts to fractional ownership of a home loan. The problem with this idea is that things can become unpleasant if the loan isn’t paid, and the owner of said derivative is using their stake in that asset as collateral on yet another loan. The bottom line is that ownership become hopelessly conflated. Good loans were packaged together with bad loans, resulting in a mortgage market where no one knew what something was worth. As the bubble popped and prices plummeted, it became a death spiral.
Companies collapsed, Americans lost jobs, and in an effort to retain political power, politicians rushed in to pass legislation to make it look like they cared and had a plan. It would not do to have Americans panic. Washington rushed in to create money out of thin air to throw at the problem. Americans were incentivized not to work as unemployment was extended and extended again. The thing is this. As Washington DC desperately tries to retain power by bribing Americans, they mask the real issues so that they become impossible to fix. Worse yet, they actually contribute to the problem. As regulations and taxes increase anyone who actually is productive is forced to fail by the additional burden of government.
Let’s face it, America is primarily a statist nation masquerading as a democratic republic. Beginning in 2008, the United States political leadership was shocked by a near collapse. Political and corporate elites rushed to the breach. They realized that their lifestyles depended on convincing Americans of three things. They had to find ways to maintain the illusion. (1) As with Rome, a nation in decline must find ways to pretend that things are not as bad as they appear. (2) In similar fashion these leaders must find ways to blame someone for the problems faced by the country. (3) Finally, it’s critical to increase federal power in order to maintain order. Political leaders in a nation in decline must maintain the status quo to retain power. These so-called leaders must make us all believe that they must increase the size of the federal government in order to be able to solve the problems facing the country. They of course fail to mention that they are the ones that caused our problems in the first place.
Most Americans are so busy trying to make their individual lives work that they fail to appreciate the situation on the macro level. In a nation approaching decline, not only must government have a scapegoat to blame citizen’s problems on, it must find reasons to control citizen’s behavior, to control people’s speech and their voluntary interactions, always with democratic sounding titles. Things like Net Neutrality become a necessity. Things like The Affordable Care Act must be imposed to not only control what you do, in this case control your health care, but they must control how you do it. In other words, they must in some way control every thing citizens do because if they for any reason lost control their dominance would quickly be threatened.
In Phoenix Republic three sisters, Catherine, Megan, and Annie experience first hand what happens when an economic disaster strikes. Phoenix Republic is fiction, but the question is how long will the back story remain so.
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