country anyway? By that I mean -- physical, tangible things - like food, cars, steel, building materials,....

The US was a farm economy, then it grew as a labor economy, but how does a nation of people sitting at a desk, looking at a computer, create wealth of any sort?

(Maybe it's a little late to ask these questions!)

What is created that provides nourishment, sustenance, or can even be sold or exchanged for something that sustains living? What do all the people do on Wall St? What about Madison Ave? What are the people doing in all those enormous skyscrapers across the country? Staring at computer screens -- playing digital money games, based on what?

I guess the only real economy left in the US is a war economy....bullet makers, and those who service the troops....

Time to hit the reset button!

a sense in trusting one's own instincts and personal knowledge to value things may return -- it seems largely to have vanished in recent times -- we turned our judgement over to experts and appraisers to determine the value of things

of course they were just guessing and making it up as they went along which is all anyone does

money itself is a middle man -- perhaps some form of barter will prevail if the dollar tanks.......

People had to be out of their minds -- if you walked up to someone and told them you'd let them live in a nicely furnished box, with shiny steel appliances in the kitchen, if they exchanged 30 years of their lives the appropriate response is laughter -- not "where do I sign"

Perhaps we should decouple our thinking from the values of particular commodities vis a vis the dollar or any other fiat based currency. When we examine things from a purely "intrinsic value" point of view, a different picture presents itself.

Certainly real property has an intrinsic value based on what can be produced on it, and each of us have unique skills and abilities to create goods and/or services with intrinsic values. So, one could assign value on these things by simply how we combine them as an interactive group, and create commerce and interdependence.

These things wouldn't so much represent some monetary measure as they would comprise the sustainable backbone of a truly free-market society.

It seems to be all leveraged against your future earning potential.

Have the courage to be responsible