I shouldn't bother to enter this thread {since I am too left-leaning in the common extremely-non-useful brainless broadbrush-painting parlance of those not really wanting to think about the variety that exists in people other than themselves}, but I'd like to insert just one overview idea for whatever it's worth:
For those imagining a collapse of the American economy and the consequent destruction/impoverishment of "All Things Holy", I would suggest that if this is all one worries about one should just crack open a Bell's Beer and watch a football game. American "Business" has placed itself at the core of a Global system of raw materials controls which will ensure that as long as anyone can continue to turn raw materials into products and sell them, they will do so.
$Dollars$ and stocks might seem to go up or down, but only the uneducated, or un-nimble, or disadvantaged will miss out. {admittedly we have more and more such individuals in America, but we "can conveniently not look too closely in their direction", and proceed with our whining Bell's Beer, Football-watching, gee-I-can't-afford-a-yacht lives.}
American business will survive over all challenges because of their homogeneity-of-purpose with the US Government. This homogeneity expresses itself most effectively and formidably in the Leviathan. The Leviathan is the Pentagon nickname for the Sea-based US military power. There is nothing like the Leviathan anywhere else on the planet, and China and Russia nervously know it.
If there are genuinely serious problems of supply of natural resources TO US BUSINESSES, the Leviathan is utilized one way or another to "moderate" if not obliterate THE SUPPLY END of those problems. BUSINESS WILL CONTINUE. The Leviathan will continue. American production and product and profit will continue. All the rest of the economic "game" is, in the end just that, a "Shadow Show" for we mini-Capitalists' playground.
If you really want to worry about something, look for something catastrophic which the Leviathan's type of force-projection cannot handle vis-a-vis resource availability. There are, I believe, only three categories: catastrophic third-world chaos on multiple geographic fronts, exhaustion of critical resources due to poorly planned consumption rates without sufficient "replacement" technology, or severe widespread environmental deterioration.
The thinking members of IE might be able to envision how these three dangers are related.......
