Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessl… - James Howard Kunstler

The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasi-slavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers).

Large-scale corporate enterprise has brought humankind much material comfort in two centuries but at the price of fantastic unintended consequences (externalized costs) ranging from the destruction of local communities to climate change. Large-scale corporations will be vulnerable to the collapse of capital formation markets that must accompany the end of the cheap oil fiesta. Corporate enterprise can certainly be reorganized on the small, local community scale, but it will not be the same as . Corporate enterprise in the Long Emergency may revert to being more public in nature and far less sovereign in power. There may be one exception: The most visible… corporate organization that might survive the Long Emergency may be the church. Whether Catholic or Pentecostal or something new we haven't seen yet; the church won't have to rely on oil supplies. Organized religion doesn't have to traffic in awkward material products, only in beliefs, and it can operate at many scales simultaneously. Because American culture is constitutionally allergic to religious governance, we may have problems if churches are the only large organizations left standing—that is, assuming we still have the same constitution.

Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish wars, and heaped under unbearable debt.