Useless Economy versus the Useful Economy

The story about the black guy who attacked some jews with a machete got me thinking about the insane story of Donald Trump pardoning the jewish gangster who ran the meat packing/animal torture/sex slavery company in Iowa Sholom Rubashkin. I totally forgot about that story. I even thought about voting for Trump in the next election, but the dude is just a fraud/frontman for those mafiosi. (Clinton was another mafioso.) That reminds me  that Harry Truman was connected to organized crime, too. That got me thinking about the AmericaWars game idea, and the notion of different power centers/patronage networks, and the concept of patronage networks in general.

The AmericaWars game idea is pretty interesting. It forces me to think about the actual political structure of the United States. The group that's hardest to categorize is the Trump voters--the yeomanry of the USA. They are organized as family units and are only loosely attached to the patronage networks that people like Trumps and Clintons are slaves to.

One of the weirder things about that yeomanry class is they control and run the useful economy. The mafiosi and politicians are really creatures of the useless economy. Unfortunately, the useless "economy" can "grow" much more quickly than the useful economy because of money and money concepts like credit and paper representations of "wealth" like stawks, bonds, and contracts. All that crap is the life's blood of patronage networks.

A few of the families I knew growing up owned small businesses that made real things like engines and parts for vehicles. Their wealth tended to accumulate in real world things too like vehicles and tools and they did a lot of barter. They really didn't need much of anything from the useless economy and barely participated in it.

One potential strategy for the yeomanry in an AmericaWars scenario is de-financialization. The paper-wealth system makes transactions seem fast and low-friction, but a giant parasitic system is required for something like the credit card network to function. If the yeomanry kicked the middle-man out of their dealings and focused on actual wealth creation and real economic growth, they'd be able to enjoy a much higher standard of living than they do today.