Offering a theory for why anti-depressant use in America has gone up 400% in the last two decades while the incidence of depression (ten times more prevalent now than in the 1940's) continues to rise, clinical researcher Dr. Steve Ilardi suggests the following:

"we were never designed for the modern sedentary, socially isolated, sleep-deprived, fast food-laden, indoor, frenetic pace of modern life."

Ilardi goes on to report sustainable cure rates when a more traditional ‘hunter-gatherer’ lifestyle is introduced to afflicted patients, what he calls the restoral of “protective lifestyle elements from the past.”

Adding an economically deterministic cast to this avalanche of happy pills, one might argue that we’ve come to live such a harried existence largely at the behest of capitalism. After all profit profits from freneticism, no small part of which is the writing of 150 million anti-depressant prescriptions per annum.

Mind you, I haven’t thrown the towel in on capitalism, and frankly I surprise myself with recent recourse to key Marxist tropes. Like Marx himself, may I offer the disclaimer that I’m not a Marxist? After all one only has to reference Ludwig von Mises to find powerful arguments in favor of curtailing reckless credit expansion and ruinous boom-to-bust business cycles, all within the rubric of capitalism. In short there are prescriptive measures offered by capitalist economists to smooth the rough edges of capitalism.

Thus I continue to believe there is ample room for the average Joe to express his disgust short of a Workers’ Revolution. However grassroots indignation needs to well up in short order or our grandkids could be surfing dumpsters like Rio de Janeiro street urchins. My hope is that the average American is in a slow boil, rather than a pharmacologically-induced stupor or a media-induced trance. Such hope however cannot spring eternal.

That said, I have been pondering two powerful quotes in recent weeks. One from retired labor lawyer Doug Page who argues in Dissident Voice that what America really faces is a demand crisis masked by a credit crisis. In a passage that conjures classic Marxist overproduction, Page points out:

“The evidence shows that ever since 1980, capitalists could not make a profit producing things that people really need. The fact that capitalist employers draw out tremendous salaries and dividends from the production our labor creates and the fact that investment banks draw out more in interest, leaves us employee-consumers with insufficient wages and salaries to buy the goods our labor has produced. So the employers have ‘overproduction.’”

Certainly Henry Ford, enlightened capitalist, grasped Page’s hyphenated entity, the employee-consumer. Ford’s revolutionary $5-a-day-wage-plan transformed many an employee into a consumer overnight. While generous wages create robust markets, they also run counter to the competitive dynamic of capitalism. Therein lies the central paradox and the germ of chronic capitalist crisis.

Then there’s this. As Frederick Engels wrote in 1877 in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, when workers become “in want of the means of subsistence”, capitalism steers itself right into a ditch Here’s an astonishingly prescient quote from Engels which seems to nail the current economic crisis dead-to-rights (or maybe not so prescient as Engels had observed this cycle repeating itself no less than six times between 1825 and 1877):

“Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsalable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution.

The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.

Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began--in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again.”

What Engels could never have foreseen was financial capitalism's deft wielding of monstrous complexity, the concealment of risk, the originate-and-distribute 'hot potato' model, securitization as camouflage, the democratization of credit, the false hope of counter-parties and unanticipated concentration risk, tax code manipulation, etc. But let’s not be too hard on Engels. Who beyond a select few understood the harrowing implications of structured finance (such a hubristic term!) even nine months ago?

Even now, the ‘rationale’ of bubble fervor is hard to reconstruct. More apt perhaps is a wholesale surrender to Alan Greenspan’s irrational exuberance theory or the madness of crowds. My sense is Engels would resist the anomalous characterization of bubbles and argue instead that they are simply business-as-usual, crisis-driven by-products inherent to capitalism. He might also marvel at the financial capitalist's ability to 'feed at the socialist trough' whenever it suits him. But should we be surprised? Greed is a Judeo-Christian sin, answerable only to the ideology of expedience. Or perhaps we should say capitalism is institutionalized greed and not an ideology at all? We flatter greed when we ascribe to it anything other than character flaw or sin.

But imagine free boardroom lunches on every day of the week. As the elite looted from the top via stock options, ridiculous salaries, complicitous boardrooms, etc., they simultaneously (and ingeniously) created credit models that augmented stagnant wages and sustained the workers' consumption patterns thereby forestalling (though clearly not repealing) the Marxist cul de sac of overproduction. In short, cheap credit caused the worker to believe he was maintaining his standard of living and enjoying the fruits of his production. For a time it masked his real wage declines. However this credit-fueled hiatus has reached an abrupt and calamitous end.

The Freddie/Fannie paper factory also benefited from an implied governmental (read: socialist) backstop which, as it turned out, was ultimately invoked; this aggressive credit creation relied upon the gumption of relatively less sophisticated and emergent capitalist markets (many prior Marxist-Leninist states ironically) that, for a variety of currency and developmental reasons, were happy to fulfill the limited role of vendor-financing producers with limited domestic consumption.

Like any Ponzi scheme, this dog-and-pony show can only be put on once.
China will not be fooled again. Indeed China’s own imperative towards stimulating domestic consumption will almost certainly ensure the cessation of the vendor financing conveyor belt.

Meanwhile the American worker is being unceremoniously dumped back into a classic Marxist overproduction trap as credit sources evaporate, home equity disappears, manufacturing jobs vanish and inflation --the ultimate wage-slayer-- looms. New cars and houses stack up. Absent credit, no one can afford them; which is to say, no one could afford them in the first place. When the deleveraging process concludes, 'mere' wages --and the horrendous wage disparities displayed therein— will return society to a more self-conscious class struggle.

The question is, when will the American pot finally boil over into meaningful social unrest? Or are Americans so naturally docile (and/or medicated) that outrage is not an available response? Is Prozac Huxley's soma? If so, they sure as hell better find a way to keep the pills rolling. There aren’t enough fields to have us all escape to the country.

Norman Ball is a frequent guest on Channel 10’s Point Taken TV as well as an Associate Political Editor for The Potomac Journal. A comprehensive resume of his writings resides here at Ambush Arts. His youtube video channel is here. Norm can be reached at