Let Them Eat Cake!

With the recent failure of hedge funds, financial instruments gambling upon consumer debt, it may be America’s realigning economy will become anachronistic. Wall Street’s financial district will disappear, and the quaint but realistic merchant shops once littering Manhattan’s streets and alleys will return. They would be selling fresh vegetables, fruit, meats, spices, perfume, baubles, and other accoutrement to thriving New Yorkers. They would not be selling multiple mortgages packaged at budget interest rates. The need to amass billions of dollars would cease, and humanity would return at a provincial grass-roots level. Guilds would take the place of the House and the Senate, and Free Masons would proliferate. Their symbol is on the back of our paper currency. The mundane skills of blacksmithing, cobbling, furniture-making, and cooking would re-inherit their former glory, and the tenets of American social class would shrink. The economy would contract but would come to rest firmly on a foundation of demand and supply. The Gross National Product would become inconsequential, because America would be concerned only with providing for herself. Imperialist desires would be quelled by a previous War in Iraq, another plunder tapping the pocketbooks of citizens. As the financial industry recedes cloaked and incognito, mainstream American minutemen would launch an offensive reestablishing control of the Federal Reserve. Those guilty of the Wall Street melt down would be humiliated, publicly shackled in stocks at the town square, not Town Hall. They would be left to be tormented by their livid dupes. If they whimpered for contrition, maybe guillotine would be spared.