Dear Millennials: If You Want to Escape Minimum Wage Debt-Serfdom…

Those without value-creating human/social capital will be mired in a low/minimum wage environment that will make it difficult to escape debt-serfdom. Let’s start with the sobering reality that the Millennial generation faces economic challenges that are unique to this era: sky-high student loan debt, soaring costs for basics such as rent and healthcare, a stagnant neofeudal crony-cartel economy and an intellectually bankrupt status quo in thrall to failed ideologies: Keynesian Cargo Cult central banking, outdated models of capital and labor and an unthinking worship of debt-funded centralization as the “solution” to all social and economic ills. The potential solutions are also unique to this era. Never before has humankind had such a wealth of revolutionary decentralizing technologies: nearly friction-free peer-to-peer networks and commerce, decentralized cryptocurrencies and the expansion of what my friend G. F. B. describes as neo-tribalism: opt-in communities that are not bound to geography or central-state imposed identities. Many smart, well-informed people see massive government stimulus using borrowed money as the “solution” to Millennial impoverishment and under-employment–in other words, more debt-funded centralization. The idea here is that such debt-funded stimulus will employ millions of Millennials to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.

This post was published at Charles Hugh Smith on TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2016.