The Simplest, Most Obvious Solution to Our Credit Problems
If you ever find yourself in this situation, you will know why I am making this proposal: you feel bad, you reach in your wallet for that little
piece of plastic with your name and a set of numbers embossed on it and you go out and buy the thing you need least in the world. If
this sounds like you, then you have what all of us have—an addiction to credit. This addiction is enabled by everything and everyone
around you and it will take a huge amount of will power to end it. But if all of us try to end it together, then we can eradicate the addiction
before the addiction eradicates the global economy.
Some necessary prerequisites will be needed before we can reap the benefits of this cure. First we must demand of the people who
believe unfailingly in the wisdom of the markets to correct and fix everything to find a better fixation. They need to move on in life, get help
with their delusions. Once we get these market correctors corrected, then we need to ask the fiscal conservatives in our midst to stop
their lying and deceptive practices as to what a healthy economy needs. What a healthy economy needs, my friends, is not an
“acceptable level of unemployment,” or social systems based on corporate profit or a military whose only goal is the continued
acquisition of weaponry based on the pipedreams of sadists.
The final requirement is to get the Congress people to refrain from ever taking one penny from anyone, no matter what they are selling
or in whose interests they are told this project will work.
Then we can take immediate action that must, in my estimation, last for one generation, at least. We must end all credit purchases. No
longer will we be able to purchase something with that weird little piece of plastic. The only numbers we will need to remember are the
ones in our pocket on the face of the currency we carry there. Think about my proposal for a short moment before you go into shock,
because this is a form of shock therapy for the entire financial and wealth industry.
According to this recovery plan, the only way you can ever purchase anything no matter its size or its type is to pay for it in cash. We need
to kill the credit industry. It is a plague which will not die at its own hand. So long as we are allowed to pay for something with a promise
of some day actually paying for it, the credit addiction will not end. The other side of the coin though may be that by having to pay now
with money we have earned we may also question whether what we are buying is a necessary purchase. It is also hoped that we will
regain our respect for work, for the wages we earn and for the ways in which we plan to spend those wages. It may also move this
country out of the trap of being a purely consumer society with no other real industry.
It will also make us think about time in a different way. While we count down the years until we can pay for something on credit again,
we could ask ourselves what it means to buy something on time. What can that mean? We have no control over time or how it proceeds
or what it brings. Why should we be allowed to buy things on time—that means we all believe that time will keep us true to our word that
we will pay our debts. Things happen to us that can change how able we may become to pay off that mortgage or car payment.
By giving ourselves a generation without credit, we can also think about how to radically alter the system so we can retool what credit is,
what it should do and how we can control it. Perhaps we will discover that we cannot control it, that greed is as basic to our being as is
the need for air and water and that credit needs to be outlawed.
Not being in the prediction business, the only thing I can predict about this total abstinence is that I predict it will make you
uncomfortable to think about this. Maybe you will dismiss my proposal as just a parody of other indecent proposals. But something is
greatly wrong with the economy and we all need to help in finding a solution and not just rely on the people who got us in this mess to
find the way out.
No matter how indecent a proposal this is, it can help us give up our addiction to buying things in order to feel better. It can end the ways
in which the media pester us to buy things in order to woo and satisfy their advertisers. It can change the ways in which we work and
play. It will ultimately, I hope, put an end to all evil in the world and make everyone as happy as happy can be. Perhaps I am overstating
the benefits, but I am sure you can understand why I feel the urgent need to do that.