Survival trends for 2010

From Charles Hugh Smith:

Here are a few key trends which will gather momentum in 2010--trends drawn from the Survival+ analysis.

My purpose in writing Survival+ was to provide a coherent account (i.e. an integrated understanding) of the powerful trends which are working beneath the superficial surface of our economy and culture.

Survival+ explains why the status quo is doomed, and illuminates the mechanisms which doom it. It also describes "the way out"--we must each put our energy into constructing a parallel, transparent, self-organized, re-localized system which is entirely legal and entirely independent of the failing, doomed status quo which is stripmining the productive to enrich the public and private Elites (file under "Fall of the Empire, Roman and other").

Here are a few of the trends described in Survival+ which I anticipate will be gathering momentum in 2010.

1. Millions of productive citizens will opt out, voluntarily or involuntarily. Millions of small business owners will get tired of paying taxes so thousands of Federal bureaucrats can "earn" $170,000 a year (and pile up benefits the private sector can only dream about) and make sure Goldman Sachs employees (the "doing God's work" CEO is only worth $250 million, poor guy) can divvy up $16 billion in ill-gotten gains.

While they aren't wealthy, many small business owners are comfortable because they scrimped and saved and sacrificed. So when they close their business because it's no longer worth the hassle, the guff, the taxes, the bureaucratic fees and paperwork, then they will survive. The closure of the business will deprive their employees of jobs and the local stripmining machinery (local government) of tax revenues--revenues which cannot be replaced.

Given the dominance of the financial sector, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and a hundred other concentrations of capital and political power (cartels), then the individual citizen has literally no choice but to opt out.

Those who have worked like crazy to net $170,000 will no longer be willing to work that hard so they can pay absurdly high tax rates to support bureaucrats raking in $170,000 a year for going to pre-meetings (or whatever) and public-employee retirees double-dipping (drawing $100K+ pensions and bennies and getting rehired immediately on contract to do the same job they just left.)

No, thank you, we really don't need to work this hard to support you. We are tired of being serfs. The more you try to tax "the rich," the more "rich" people will opt out. ...

Read the rest here.