CAUSE OF THE SLUMP.

DEVOURING CIVILIZATION BY LACK OF INFRASTRUCTURE.

What caused the slump? The disorganization of the US economy. Basically the public sector did not set up correctly the arena of the free market with the correct public infra-structure (the structure below the free markets)necessary to support it. The US eco-nomy ("house-management") became impotent. Indeed it came to depend upon other countries for:

Energy procurement
Manufactured goods
Savings
Entertainment ("War on Terror", imperial overstretch, invading and bombing various countries).

Moreover, the plutocracy made it so that the average person became ever more impotent, robbing them of income, employment, political power.

To hypnotize the masses, the plutocracy persuaded them that they could be rich too, if only they borrowed enough. That was nice trap: the more credit, the better the masses felt, and the more the plutocrats made money. Ultimately an energy cost spike buried that self destructive dream. Borrowing oneself to wealth revealed itself to be borrowing oneself to death.

Some will say that description makes no sense: why would a society let that happen to itself? Why would a society let itself be eaten alive by its ravenous plutocracy?

Well, the historical examples abound of societies were an increasingly hubristic plutocracy drove the society it overlorded above to death.

It is exactly what happened in the Roman empire. And that happened for bad, but powerful reasons, and that is why they tend to happen over and over again. Those reasons have to do with the intrinsic nature of human beings and the nature of capital and the exponential function. Left undomesticated those laws of nature devour civilization.

So what should be done? Invert it all.

It can be done. It has been done. The history of Europe after the disintegration of the Greco-Roman empire is pretty much a struggle to invert what went wrong with the Greco-Roman socioeconomy. The first three important measures taken by the Franks in the West were to block the attack of the Christian superstition against education, the second was to throw out a lot of sexism, the third was to outlaw slavery. All these decisions led the economy of Western Europe to become the most energy intensive in the world, and, at least for a while, the society was reborn in the liberty, equality, fraternity arena (recent archeological studies show this).

The situation nowadays is similar. First the plutocracy ("money-power") should be put back in its cage. Superstition should be pushed back, reason and education re-expanded. One should aim to take social, technological, and industrial measures to make the economy much more energy efficient than it has been in the past.

Indeed, it's not enough to just use ever more energy. The Franks discovered this during the Middle Ages: they ran out of forests, that is carbon. The central governments in France and Germany and Italy had to take drastic measures against deforestation (all the way to "banning" people from some areas, under the penalty of death; the Dominican republic had to take somewhat similar measures in recent decades to avoid the fate of its neighbor, Haiti).

What counts is efficient work ("Work" in the sense of physics textbooks). That should be increased. Overall energy consumption should be decreased. In these crucial parameters, the USA has faltered (France is three time more efficient in carbon usage by unit of GDP).

By the way, all the decisions taken by the Franks were top down, and had to do with new legislation imposed by a powerful State, the Imperium Francorum. There was nothing "bipartisan" about any of this. It had every thing to do with a new imperial State thinking it knew what it was doing, and breaking the old conceptual order of the Greco-Romans (outlawing their slavery and sexism), and the conceptual order of the Christians (who had been assaulting reason and education to promote their superstitious rule). Taxation and legislation also broke the extravagant Greco-Roman plutocracy.

Finally when the undefeated Islamist armies invaded Francia, the Franks nationalized the Christian church. This counter intuitive move allowed them to have money to pay for the largest mobile army seen since early imperial Rome (it also made the point that this war was not about religion). That implied payments to support the families of the drafted soldiers. Another form of socialism, that was invented just for the occasion (the Roman army never used such a modern system to allow soldiers to have families, but two different systems that did not survive, because they were not as good).

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