The face of real recovery You live in a cardboard box. It’s fairly spacious, a nice refrigerator crate. A step up from the computer boxes you used to rent from an escaped psychotic named Lou.Right now, you’re standing on the corner. You’re cold. Starbucks is staring you in the face. You want to buy a cup of coffee. You’ve only got 10-cents in your pocket. The coffee scent hits you each time the door is opened. People with those cups pass by, smiling, energized. You wish you were them.

You’re an addict. You’re addicted to Starbucks. And today, you’re fucked.

Until, he came along. He had an air of wealth. Blue suit, yellow tie, hair slicked back. He walked with vintage Michael Douglas swagger.

He sees you staring. He sees the change in your hand. He looks at the change, then turns back to the Starbucks, then meets your eye. This is a man who knows the price of a cup of coffee.

“Need some money?”

You explain you’re homeless. You’re cold. You need some Starbucks. You’re addicted. It’s a terrible thing, and you’ll get help one day, swear to god, but today you just need your fix. Look at my hands shaking. You feel sick.

You can see his wheels turning. This is a man who’s here to help.
“Starbucks is everyone’s god-given right. That’s why it’s on each and every corner. See what I’m saying. You get it. I’ll tell you what. I’ll lend you that four-fifty you need to get your fix. Now, you’ll have to pay me back though with interest. Usually for a sweet deal like this, I’d want some collateral, like that dime you’ve got there, but I trust you’re good for the cash.

So keep your money. You just give me a penny every day—or more if you’ve got it. I’ll charge you just a little interest for the first year, very little, almost like you’re paying me nothing more than what I’m lending you. After that year, if you haven’t yet paid back the four-fifty . . . it won’t be too hard . . . I’m just saying . . . I’ll have to double the interest. Then I’ll need two-cents a day until you pay me off. But don’t miss a payment because I’ll have to take that cardboard box you live in under the bridge to cover the balance of the debt.”

You take a pause, try to think (that’s not always the easiest thing to do). It can’t be that hard to scrounge up a penny extra a day. You work hard at pan-handling. You’re good at it. You tell a good joke. You can do the worm. You can probably scrounge up two pennies a day. You’ll pay the debt off without even paying much interest! A Starbucks is yours. You stop. Your face firms with decision. “It sounds good to me,” you say, extending a hand. He takes it in his, both bound together in this moment.

“Deal!”

You know what comes next. It’s hard to raise more than a penny a day. A year passes, the interest doubles. The payment becomes impossible to make. Soon your cardboard box falls down. Should have been built with bricks, pig.

This is the story of the 2008 economic meltdown. The poor disadvantaged people of “Main Street” taken advantage of by unscrupulous bankers whose blue suits and yellow ties are filled with a predatory evil. Greed is not good so the story goes, because in the end everyone loses. “Main Street” finds itself living on the street, totally fucked. The debt goes unpaid. The banker has no cash. The capital used to fund that loan doesn’t get paid back to the person who extended it. The banker, who over-extended his capital? Fucked. The banker who put the debt? Fucked. All those hanging around him? Fucked too because now they can’t get credit from him.

It’s a total gang bang-bam goes the free market.

Then enter the hero. The man on the white horse gallops in to save the day with his optimism, charm and 800-billion dollars. He gives it to the bankers to help them get back on their feet. He helps “Main Street” get back their little boxes or keep the ones they can no longer afford. He even gives out jobs, so everyone who’s been fucked can get back on their feet and return to their daily Starbucks for a double-shot fix. We all live happily ever after.

You think you know the story, but like most fairy tales, this one has an ending that you’ve never heard. Like the Frog Prince.

The Frog Prince doesn’t end with a wedding; it ends with the death of the Prince’s faithful second, whose heart breaks when the Prince and Princess get what they want: each other. In our story, everyone getting what they want—their slice of the good life, the money, the coffee, an American Dream—and our trusty servant that brought us to this, the free market economy, breaks.

Because the white horse has no legs and she falls at the gate. The hero riding upon her dances well, but always to “Burning Down the House” even during the slow numbers. The people all get the bailout they need, but they never change their spending ways once they are back on their feet.

It’s happened before—like a few months ago. The price of oil goes up. It’s Prius. The price goes down. Land Rover. Go Green!

No matter where you go, no matter what reward you get once you’re there, you bring yourself along with you. The Prince and the Princess, arms loaded with personal baggage, break up. Iron John’s heart cannot be put back together again. Our homes leave us for a Chinese banker. Our legs are taken out from under us, snap. Humpty Dumpty, we all fall down.

But once again, instead of getting back up, we lie there waiting for someone to buy us a Rascal, so we can tool around WalMart with our broken leg. Mo’ stimulus, mo’ problems.

The idea of economic stimulus fails to address the root cause of our economic issues, a total lack of responsibility and an institutional system that rewards ignoring the information about the ramifications of our excess. These are the two things that a balanced free market functions well on, fiscal responsibility and good information. Take them away and you end up with a broken market, and a long line of broke people, rich and poor alike.

In our story, neither the man craving Starbucks nor the man in the suit showed responsibility or heeded the information that was before them. The Starbucks addict ignored the fact that he couldn’t pay off the loan in the first place and the interest would make it hard for him to ever pay it off. He showed no fiscal responsibility in his irrational desire for the Starbucks. He fucked himself for a cup of gourmet coffee.

The Suit ignored the fact that Starbuck could never pay off their debt. He took no responsibility for his actions in selling him the loan in the first place, after all for that he made his bonus, and got his own Starbucks branch in the basement of his East Hampton home. Plus, he buried the information about his actions in a pile of lousy derivatives. Where, the American people overspent for the simple luxury of bigger homes, the Bankers over leveraged themselves to get bigger bonuses and more replete luxuries. No responsibility, ignorance rampant, boom precedes bust.

And these are the same reasons why new Deal style stimulus is not the answer. We don’t need to replace a free market with nationalization, or federal jobs, all these handouts. That’s replacing fiscal irresponsibility with more debt, this time national debt. It’s ignoring the information regarding what that irresponsibility means, our future poverty, perhaps even the death of federalist republican democracy as a result of the first-world’s financial implosion.

It’s also a reaction to a false premise: the free market is broken. What’s broken is not the free market; it’s the institutions, both public and private, that reward people for ignorance and irresponsibility. It’s banks that excessively incentivize employees for short-term gains, penciled numbers on paper. It’s people who are incentivized with flat-screen TV sets for dropping eight-thousand dollars in debt on a card with a twenty-one percent APR. The current economic stimulus plan is just another incentive for bad behavior. It rewards both bankers and the people yet again, paying off their mistakes of ignorance and irresponsibility and in turn promoting more ignorance and irresponsibility—when it’s ignorance and irresponsibility that landed us all in a shitter of insolvency.

What if we didn’t prop up the people and the institutions? New ones would arise in their place, new institutions with new models of behavior that would succeed because they take a new path: banks that incentivize employees on long-term performance; families that don’t take out a credit card to buy an iPod when they can hardly buy dinner; a free market economic system based on responsibility and knowledge.

This is Creative Destruction, the free market’s reset switch when broken business models crash. It’s time for us to let it happen. Fuck stimulus. Creative Destruction is our white knight.

Sometimes we don’t need to be saved before we hit the ground. Sometimes we need to fall down. We’re addicts craving our Starbucks fix and until we hit bottom, we’ll never get the help we need.