What can we do? Community level

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power, Peter Schiff.

The economy is a mess. Bubbles are everywhere, including stocks, bonds, and housing. Quantitative easing cannot last forever. An ever-increasing amount of debt and liabilities that we cannot meet. This Ponzi scheme is like the game of chairs, the music will eventually stop playing and it won’t be pretty.

Financial markets, mass media, and policy makers are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political and social consequences. There are measures that you can take to minimize your risk at a personal level and actions that we should take at a community level.

At the community level, we must consider the following:

• Fight against social, political and economic apathy in a society that has allowed governments to favor big banks and corporations and assume unsustainable levels of sovereign debt. Debt is nothing but borrowing prosperity from future generations. Promote political activism and demand real democracy in order to prevent big corporations and banks from having so much power and using our political leaders as puppets for their own interests.

• Scale down or remove the fractional reserve banking system. Let’s give the state a monopoly on money creation. Money should only be created by central banks “as needed to promote non-inflationary growth."

• Demand that taxpayers should not have to pay for failing banks, for the risks taken by bankers, their weak decision making, and greedy management. If banks or any other corporations make mistakes and need to declare bankruptcy, the state should not rescue them. Otherwise, high-risk investments are encouraged (it encourages reckless behavior because the nanny state will always be on their side ready to bail them out) and sovereign debt increases.

  As a consequence, there is a steady increase in direct and indirect taxation (Inflation is taxation without legislation), leading to a decline of the welfare state and hindering investment and policies for economic growth and competitiveness (R&D, education, infrastructure, etc.).

• Replace an economic system based on scarcity (you can only sell commodities that are scarce), competitiveness (which excludes collaboration) and a completely selfish, narcissistic vision that seeks only personal gain in the very short term, here and now, regardless of the result of their actions in the medium and long term, in the community or the environment to a sustainable economy based on knowledge, renewable resources and clean technology, less growth (GDP), more well-being.

The economic system is based on greed. Even when corporations are making a profit they still cut staff (outsourcing, cloud services, automation, etc.) without giving it a second thought. These people become unemployed or get part-time and precarious jobs that do not allow them to consume as many goods and services as they used to. As a consequence, the same big corporations and companies also lose money in the long run and can even go out of business because the middle class has lost its purchasing power. Unsustainable growth and greed are a global threat. We need to change the way we live, the way we think about work, growth, etc.