A Millionaire and a Beggar

We can look at the crisis in the U.S. with envy. We surely would not be able to live the way people do there. The U.S. is on the verge of bankruptcy, and everyone is more than willing to lend it money. That is the American dream of the 21st century: A beggar is treated like a millionaire. Even if the U.S. ceased to pay off its debts, there would not be any worldwide financial crash. It is the way of the world — that someone is regarded as credible, even if this might be a great misconception. Nowadays, a credible country no longer has to be solvent or honest. The only requirement to be perceived as such is having the trust and confidence of the rest of the world. Can others lose faith in America?

If the pope lost faith in God, he would inevitably get fired. For a similar reason, lack of confidence in the U.S. would probably backfire on businessmen, stockholders, bondholders, governments, or even credit rating agency presidents. They make their millions when the U.S. remains credible. It is this country that replaced God in our secularized society, right after capitalism ultimately took over Christianity.

Losing faith in America borders on not believing in what is written on a banknote. If I do not trust your banknotes, you will automatically stop trusting mine.

The most tangible evidence of the above claim are the rates the U.S. pays for its bonds, which have not had anything to do with the amount of the country’s budget deficit for a long time. What happens to emerging markets when the U.S. runs into trouble? In Poland, the dollar exchange rate is more likely to increase than go down since when faced with an uncertainty in the global economy, people fall back on the strongest currency.

It is only symptomatic that health care in the U.S. lies at the core of the crisis. In Poland, and virtually in any other country, health care constitutes a very serious problem, but only the U.S. spends that much money on such a pathological system that does not even cover every citizen. Health care is the biggest abomination in the United States. As if this were not enough, “Obamacare,” originally intended as the antidote to the problem, has become a subject that has caused more controversy than the war.

Alexis de Tocqueville praised America as the only country with a very strong democratic instinct where the aristocracy was not present. Today, the U.S. is like the setting for a Balzac novel, in which a French aristocrat lost all his money since it had never dawned on him that he could be poor. The aristocrat benefits from his social status as long as there are people who believe in his title. The money kept pouring in until people stopped regarding him as a patrician.

But the U.S. did not achieve its economic greatness because somebody believed in it. Someone did believe in it, but only when the country had already been on top.

America was so great an authority that other countries applied solutions, recommended by Washington, that the U.S. itself would never have implemented. If we had been faced with a choice between the U.S. and EU during the times of our transformation, it would have taken but a second to decide with whom to side.

The world is still trying to believe in America. However, this might work as a dangerous sleeping pill for it. If it indeed lets itself be put to sleep, the millionaire might actually wake up a beggar.