Ashes on the dollar

Americans continue to opt out of the financial system:

Hoskins told News 5’s Courtis Fuller that he issued the bank an ultimatum. “I’ll tear it down before I let you take it,” Hoskins told them. And that’s exactly what Hoskins did. The Moscow man used a bulldozer two weeks ago to level the home he’d built, and the sprawling country home is now rubble, buried under a coating of snow.

If your life is being financially destroyed by the bankers and bureaucrats anyhow, there’s really not much reason to avoid repaying them ashes on the dollar. With 10.5% of all homes already delinquent or in default, what are the banks going to do when people simply refuse to leave or pay for them, beg the Feds to put 6.6 million homeowners in jail? And who is going to pay the costs of their imprisonment?

In 2008, the bankers, bureaucrats, and politicians tore the veil of the unwritten American social contract that permitted our debt-based economy to function. While the deck was always stacked to the benefit of the financial elite, it wasn’t always so egregious. But in ramming through TARP and the bailouts over the furious objections of the American people, they shattered the illusion of relative fairness. So now, they have absolutely no response when the American people stop playing a game that is stacked so heavily against them. The parasites came to believe they were invaluable and in doing so forgot the very first rule of parasitism: do not harm the host.

It’s almost surely too late to salvage the present financial system, but it is still worth attempting to restore the broken American social contract. The first step in doing so is to follow the Market Ticker’s advice of arresting, prosecuting and asset-stripping every member of the financial elite that can be proven to have committed criminal fraud over the last decade. The second step is to audit the Federal Reserve and open the books to the public. The third step is to unwind the banking bailouts and tax all of the bailed-out executives and employees 100 percent while making it clear that no such bailouts will ever be permitted to take place again. These measures will be totally unacceptable to the banking class, but the alternative will be much worse for everyone.

The vast majority of Americans are never going to bulldoze their houses. But millions of them – or rather, tens of millions more – are simply going to stop paying their debts and transform themselves from productive members of society into societal parasites. The time for playing economic charades is over, everyone knows that the system is crumbling because they can see the signs of it all around them. Extend and pretend simply isn’t an option anymore and the risks of refusing to deal with reality are only going to continue to grow with time.