Living beyond your means

Just when you think you've seen enough of the present financial turmoil that the world has gotten itself into - another snippet of news flashes across indicating that yet another giant has fallen and yet another index has breached an all-time low. The real surprise these days is when markets are in the green. And even then that is always accompanied by a feeling that this is only temporary and that things are going to be bleak again soon. If you ask experts they will give you a hundred esoteric reasons for the current crisis. Most of those are likely to involve cryptic academic terms(well cryptic to people like me anway) like 'subprime', 'liquidity', 'leveraged', 'toxic asset' and the like. But what no one will be willing to tell you is that we are simply living beyond our means.

I have indicated in previous posts too that the greatest problem with our lifestyle today is that it is unsustainable. For a number of reasons. To start with, we simply do not have enough resources to support the kind of life that we're selling to more and more people by the day. By creating an aspirational lifestyle modeled on cowboy capitalism we're simply stretching the limited supplies of most everything that we have on this planet. Space, clean air, fuels, water - you name it. To further complicate matters man invented something truly ingenious to masquerade as a resource - money. Look how we've built an entire industry out of just that. What every self-respecting Wall Streeter will tell you is that he manages money for a living. So much fuss about something that isn't even backed by gold anymore. Yes, the Gold Standard has long been replaced by Fiat Currency. In other words if you hold a billion dollars of cash in your account and feel mighty pleased with yourself, don't - it's just paper.

What is even more baffling is that some of the people who claim to be champions of the free market and the pioneers of the super-capitalist economic model, find themselves in a soup today. America is crumbling, and how. Make no mistake. This is the very nation whose policies and lifestyles are aped by most of the developed and delveloping world today. And one fine day you wake up to realize that they're wrong anyway. What the Americans have managed to do for so long and so desultorily is live off the rest of the world's money. By promising the world that America is the best place to put your money, they have bloated themselves on the savings of effectively the whole of the global economy. And now they're going down, it's only natural that they should take us down with them.

What if things had been different? What if someone drove some sense into the heads of those hedonistic Americans early enough? What if their politicians weren't the spineless, goading buffoons who simply refused to say at any point of time that the party was over. What if we didn't idolize Wall Street managers who seemed to be the perfect success stories till only yesterday? What if...

The fact remains that there is an urgent need to rethink the lifestyles and economic models that we have been espousing as superlative for the past century. Anyone who has watched 'An Inconvenient Truth' or knows more than zilch about the environment will tell you how we are at the crossroads on this planet today - we could take the bumpier road which entails responsible living or we could take the glistening tarmac that leads to a planet ravaged and overstretched by the gluttons that its inhabitants would have become by then. The choice is ours to make.