Alchemy Revisted-The Creation of Wealth in the American Economy

The investing public and the corporate leadership linked to the companies most efficiently producing nothing will reap most of the benefit. It takes less than three percent of our population (aided by the judicious use of chemicals, radiation and heavy capital investment) to feed the rest of us. The majority of the American workforce processes information or sells sounds and pictures. We assign almost mythic qualities to higher and higher speed transmissions. The people who still seem to produce something seem to be the losers in this economic revolution. Their well paying production jobs have been shipped overseas where their former employer hopes to get something for nothing. The American workers have a choice of the shame of "workfare" or accepting jobs that barely allow you to exist at the edge of nothing. If they chose to do nothing, the people who profit from nothing will accuse them of being something less than nothing.

An economic system built upon the expansion of wealth by means of producing nothing has a shaky foundation to buttress the edifice against a storm. What if our faith in the alchemy of wealth was shattered? In 1929, the factories closed, banks called in loans on real property and a negative spiral dominated the public's thinking. Franklin Roosevelt knew that investment in capital goods would have to be the ultimate savior. His flirtation with the use of nothing had begun to fail around 1938. World War II's insatiable demand for good and services reversed our economic doldrums. In October of 1987, some economists save we barely missed another great crash.

By 1987 we were still in the process of conversion to a postindustrial society. The crash was avoided by a loosening of credit that allowed people to borrow to pay their debts. Today, what would be the consequences of a realization that the "economy is naked." If a major hedge fund or some other alchemistic machination were allowed to go belly up what would we do? Does our society have the sense of family that allowed it to survive the Great Depression? If the dust bowl strikes can we eat our seed corn? I am afraid that we would be left with nothing!

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