Maybe this is a weird tangent that no one sane would associate with your initial post, but there's no forum rule against mental illness, so...
There once was a civilization where:
- the ruler was considered a living god, whose daily activities controlled all social and natural phenomena, and whose good health and well-being was essential to the prosperity of the country;
- after the god-king died, his body was carefully preserved and a large monument built to show it off; he was still talked about like a living person;
- the society was in practice run by priests with absolute authority, who were considered both the most learned and most holy and who brutally stamped out any blasphemy against the state religion;
- the economy was run by priests and every economic activity was passing through the temples in some way;
- most people, while formally free, in practice owned nothing and were completely dependent on the state for their day-to-day survival;
- then there was a large number of actual slaves with no rights who were worked to death;
- a lot of that unfree labor was directed to gigantic public projects that had little economic utility but showed off the power and glory of the state and its religion.
Am I talking about ancient Egypt, or "modern" Soviet Union? And their supposedly polar opposites, the National Socialists, were more explicit (if less effective) in their "forward to the past" plans, with their official cult of a divine Fuhrer, their idealized Lebensraum of smallholder farmers ruled over by SS paladins, and their attempts to resurrect Norse gods, occultism and other forms of pre-Christian superstition. It even has a name: Reactionary Modernism.
And before you, a free American, throw a stone at this Europoor stupidity, you might want to make sure you do not live in a glass
pyramid yourself. Every time you talk about a "Biden economy" you are expressing a belief that an old man who barely knows where he is at the same time influences daily market behavior of 300 million people (at the very least).
I guess Ancient Egyptian peasants at least understood that while the Pharaoh performs the most important state duties, like interceding with the gods or protecting the Constitution; the boring stuff like collecting taxes, enforcing laws, managing the economy and so on fall to the priests. Thus they wouldn't be surprised that while in this century all sorts of presidents have occupied the White House - starting from an acceptable loyal opposition man like Bush, then a true apparatchik like Obama, then the Orange Mussolini, and finally the First Senior Citizen - the government did mostly the same things. And Ra help you if you talk impersonally about "the White House" making policy - you might remind yourself that the word "pharaoh" literally means "great house". Yeah, I sure do hope too the Big Person in the Big Building makes the tides of Nile lift our stock market, my fellow
fellah.
What I'm trying to say through this oversized screed is that the long 20th century was the process of collective rejection of individualist, capitalist economy and a reversion to the standard, timeless model of settled human civilization. In fact, when I see American complaints about such things, it takes me a moment to understand what exactly is the problem. Where I live, it has always been like this: small elite is secure inside the System, the great majority suffers in the ocean of misery around it. Generally, the less like America a country is, the more it conforms to this model; and America itself becomes less "like America" each year.
Of course productivity is divorced from consumption. What would be the point of joining the System otherwise?
If you want to see the future, visit a Brazilian gated community, and then go sightseeing (there are actual guided tours on offer) to a favela. Or hell, just walk from Google's campus to a nearest homeless encampment. The clock is ticking, the window of opportunity is closing; there might be little time left to ensure your and yours place in the System before the process of "pharaohization" is complete.
