The Terror Fabulous

Since it’s the 4th of July here’s something I came across about a month ago: America – The Grim Truth

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

Given that at some point in the future America will become a Hollow State, how are Americans to respond? The first and easiest way, the way that doesn’t involve holing up in the mountains with canned food and carrying the fire, is to do what the article advocates: get out while the getting’s good. This, I would argue, is the most patriotic thing an American can do: the country’s best and brightest becoming a diaspora and spreading their skills and values across the globe is a surer and certainly less violent way of America accomplishing that much touted historical mission of spreading Democracy across the world. For example, if millions of Americans were to liquidate their assets and strike out to, say, the more peaceful parts of Africa, they would find an indigenous population receptive to American culture from cell-phones to hip-hop. The post-Americans could get their hands dirty with real Capitalism: invest money in machinery and employees to run that machinery (or retail space and salespeople etc.), make or sell something people want, invest the profits in bigger machines or more (or better paid) employees. The kind of basic stuff anyone with an MBA would scoff at that has been driving the standard of life for all of humanity upwards for the past 200 years. The next American frontier, the one after the West but before Space, would be the developing world- instead of governments and corporations stabbing Charter Cities right into a developing nation’s sovereign territory, how about Americans building the infrastructure and ‘good rules’ that will help nations develop from the grass roots up?

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