When Conventional Success Is No Longer Possible, Degrowth And The Black Market Beckon

"Phantom economies tend to give rise to gray and black markets in proportion to the deviance of the phantom economy from reality."

College graduates around the world are discovering that getting a university diploma no longer guarantees the conventional success story of a secure job and a life of ever-rising consumption. Doing all the things that the Status Quo said would lead to success no longer yields success, for the simple reason that the Status Quo is failing on a structural/systemic level.

The system is rigged to protect the Status Quo mafia from competition. As noted in The Mafia State of Mind (February 6, 2014), the Status Quo is a set of overlapping monopolies/extortion rackets. The system needs a trickle of new technocrats and apparatchiks to manage the rackets, but there is no place for the tens of millions of college graduates who are flooding into the job market every year around the world.

New conventional enterprises face essentially impossible barriers: sky-high rents, absurdly lengthy and costly permitting processes, onerous fees and reporting requirements, and a host of other barriers reputedly imposed to "protect the public" but whose real purpose is to eliminate small-enterprise competition to corporate dominance.

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