I have been hovering at an arms length distance over the “debt ceiling” debate and unfolding government-inaction-by-paralysis, observing there is too much ideological positioning and not enough practical thinking and doing.

With the national debt ceiling deadline looming (and all the hand wringing catastrophic prognostications a default would bring,) coupled with high unemployment, waning consumer demand, midway through 2011 feels like capitalism death-spiral for sure.

Our founding fathers gave us the mandate and opportunity for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” in the form of a democratic capitalistic society. This means citizens must consume goods and services and businesses must bloom to create the goods and services for consumers. Businesses employee the citizens,  and those citizens are supposed to consume the goods and services. This dosey-do dance is how our country is supposed to work, and sometimes (like right now) the delicate balance between the interests important to business and the needs important to consumers gets out of kilter.

The United States of America is the greatest “startup” ever created on Earth. All the right initial ingredients were put in place to let citizens pursue happiness, and thus go forth and consume. But over the past decade consumer demand to purchase sufficient goods and services to propel economic growth has stalled. The stall is for various reasons, but we are purchasing less stuff today than we did 2001.

For example in the automobile industry, advances in design, lubrication, and quality allow our cars to last twice as long as cars just fifteen years ago. We’re buying 25% fewer cars now than before.

Unless we make some fundamental changes in the fabric of our society, the stall will become a vicious cycle  as consumers stop buying, business lower output and reduce employees, and then there are fewer people with the means to purchase the already reduced business output.

As a society we need to start to plan for the fact that rapidly advancing technologies gives us tremendous benefits, but at the same time are displacing people form jobs.  We need to plan for a day not too far off where we need less workers to create the goods and services for our consumption based society.

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