Doug Casey Opposes New American Dream: You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy

Doug Casey at the InternationalMan.com argues that with the cost of marriage, two children, cars, homes, healthcare, education, and retirement is now $3.4 million, the classic middle-class American Dream is now out of reach for most young Americans. 

Casey observes that although the U.S. standard of living has been slipping over the past 50 years, the average American still lives much better and longer today than a king during pre-industrial times.  

The reason Americans achieved this high standard of living was due to people producing more than they consumed and saving the difference.  The last 200 years has been a period where the value of technology has been doubling every two years, referred to Moore’s Law.  

But Casey argues that future success in achieving the American Dream is now not guaranteed on either of these fronts.  Because Americans have drastically cut back on saving, threatening the pool of capital pool necessary to finance further advances in technology and threatening of destruction of the value of the US dollar.

Casey sees this withering of the American Dream as like termites eating away at the foundations of our civilization.  It has become “customary for Americans to think that it’s okay for some people to live their entire lives without producing at all and to live at the expense of others. A lot of the country is on welfare. And many more are buried in consumer debt, which means they’re either living off the capital others have saved in the past, or they’re mortgaging their own futures.”

From 1880 to 1980, the main US exports were Boeing planes, industrial equipment and soybeans.  But since the 1980s the number one American export has been US dollars.  Foreigners have accepted those paper dollars in exchange for what they thought was real wealth.  But now dollars are just another form of debt, and at some point foreigners will repatriate massive amounts of dollars in exchange for titles to land and companies.

The destruction of American capital has been accelerated by a constant series of wars that the US fights against insignificant countries, usually on the other side of the planet.

US institutions, such as corporations, universities and government are now dominated by an a-moral professional management class that see themselves as independent agents and support an environment that has become corrupt, ineffectual, and bloated. 

Casey argues these institutions and professional managers suffer from The Second Law of Thermodynamics, that energy inevitably degenerates over time.  The same is true with most human interactions that age and eventually wind down to insignificance. 

He worries that as the American middle class continues to shrink, the “New American Dream” will not be about building a better life, but instead just getting by making ends meet.  That means people will have to rent instead of own. 

The New American Dreamers will end up taking allot more debt and eventually lose the ability to afford kids, pets, ribeye steaks, or retirement. 

This has already been heralded in a 2016 World Economic Forum video: ‘You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy’.   According to these wealthy jet-setting one-percenter elites, middle class people have no need to be burdened by private property ownership.  

Casey points out that with the bottom half of American society currently owning only 2% of the nation’s wealth, we are already in an imbalance that makes for violent political instability.  With wealth increasingly concentrated in corporations and their top executives, most major corporations are the defacto arms of the government.  They support high taxes, staggering regulations, subsidies, and bailouts, because it prevents entrepreneurs and other potential competitors from challenging their lifestyles. 

Under public-private partnership, government and top corporate elites “scratch each other’s backs and reinforce each other’s positions. They feed each other power and money. This makes for a highly politicized society, where connections, not production, are what count.”

Casey suggests that struggling middle-class people who feel they are about to be kicked down to the lower class should not go to college unless they want to major in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math degrees that lead to high-paying technical jobs that will always be in demand.  

But for most young people, four years of college will “permanently indebt you, and corrupt your mind with the idiotic ideas that Marxist professors and administrations cram down students’ throats.”  Casey believes wise individuals can educate themselves at a fraction of the cost. 

Casey suggests individuals should take their self-improvement and find some way to be self-employed.  Work hard to generate the ability to save.  Take savings and invest in gold, rather than risky paper money.  When you accumulate sufficient savings, learn to speculate and invest to achieve real wealth.  That should be the New American Dream.