The Impact Of Social Decline Upon The Economy
by Philip Atkinson

The Economy is the term given to the financial health of the community, which is the contemporary (circa 2000) way of measuring the wealth of the community.

Inevitable Loss Of Wealth
The community's retreat from reason must also be a retreat from wealth. This is confirmed by:

i. The widespread experience of unemployment, retrenchments, and redundancies together with continual experience of poor service caused by inadequate staffing levels.

ii. The negative return by the vast majority of superannuation schemes in Australia for the fiscal year 2001-2002—the large Federal Government Commonwealth Superannuation Scheme reported a loss of 5.1%

iii. The appearance of vacant shops and offices, along with the media reports of regular and spreading corporate failure, large and small, at home and abroad. By the year 2002 Australia has witnessed the collapse of the major firms One Tel (communications), Ansette Airlines (Australia's second Airline) and HIH (insurance). This has been accompanied overseas by the German Media group Kirch, and the American giants ENRON and WorldCom.

iv. The announcement by President Bush of America on 19^th September 2008, that he proposed giving numerous finance companies a massive loan of hundreds of billions of dollars of public money to cover their accumulated massive debts. This generosity was prompted by the fear that such a massive accumulation of debt would plunge Western Civilization into financial chaos and win a new Great Depression; the problem is that the people given the money were the same people whose gross incompetence created the massive debt.

A more detailed description of Western Civilization's economic collapse is described in "America: What Went Wrong" by Donald Barlett and James Steele (1992). Though it is about the decline of commerce in the USA, the influences and the outcomes are the same for all of those countries making up Western Civilization.

New Rulers Of The Community
The only firms that appear to be thriving are those whose position of trust allows them to dictate conditions and costs to the community. These include the Australian banks and the public telephone company Telstra who supply essential services at terms they alter as they see fit. This allows them to hold the community to ransom and become the new rulers of the community.

Return Of The Pawn Shop
The growing poverty has naturally seen the resurgence of the pawn shop; there are now (circa 2002) five pawn shops in my suburb, all within two blocks, with Cash Converters occupying the space of three ordinary shops, though this did not deter Captain Cash from opening in adjacent premises in July, 2002. The mundane nature of the goods for sale clearly advertises the desperate plight of the people who have been forced to sell their property.

Media Lies
Despite the reporting of mass redundancies, company closures and corporate failures, the media plays the same role as it did during the Great Depression (1929-1944)— it reports only that the economy is doing well or about to boom. Even the rare truthful article incorporates the notion that somehow, despite the fact that most people struggle to make ends meet, the economy is sound. False claims made inevitable by the community's hatred of truth.