I’ve written, prescriptively, that money shouldn’t buy anything that matters: not healthcare or education, for example.
Anything we can do, we can afford
But at the top level money can’t buy anything you couldn’t do anyway. Anything we can’t do, we can only buy from others. The Britian of the thirties was still, despite all its problems, a great industrial power. They could do most things, and it was ridiculous to pretend they didn’t have the money. They could build ships and buildings and refine medicines and so on.
There we some things they couldn’t do: they couldn’t produce as much food as they wanted: they bad to buy that from others. But since other people wanted what they could do, they would accept British pounds.
And there were things no one could do, and money wouldn’t buy those things: go to the moon, for example.
Today, for all our money and science, we still can’t just buy an end to cancer.
There’s a little, largely bullshit “law” in economics called the “law of comparative advantage.” If we all do what we’re best at, we’ll produce the most stuff, including services and we’ll all be best off. There’s a certain technical truth to this law.
But if you can’t produce something yourself, you can only buy/do it if those who produce it are willing to sell to you, and if you must have it, they can charge very high prices if they sell at all.
Britain couldn’t produce enough Destroyers in WWII, so they had to go begging to America to get them, and the price the Americans charged was extremely, extremely high. (The book “That Man” by Justice Johnson goes into this.)
Ukraine wants a lot more missiles and artillery shells, but Europe and America don’t make enough or won’t sell large chunks of their reserves.
When you don’t have or, or lose the ability to produce something yourself you lose the ability to buy it with your own currency without other countries having a veto. Produce can mean many things, for the Japanese and Germans in WWII, it meant not having enough oil production of their own.
When America and the West in general shipped their productive capacity overseas they assumed that it didn’t matter: that in the world of free trade, they’d always be able to buy what they needed, and that they’d have effectively infinite money.
It doesn’t work like that. If we produce less, in time our standards of living will decline and in times of crisis, others will keep what matters for themselves first. (Covid vaccines illustrated this, and even if you think they didn’t work, well, at the time the vast majority didn’t believe that.)
As climate change, ecological collapse and civilization collapse continue, we will also find our ability to buy what we need constrained: not enough water in large areas. Not enough fertile farmland. It isn’t that there is nothing we can do: we can try varieties of indoor farming and we can de-salinize water and so on, but we won’t be able to buy enough of what we need. We won’t be able to easily buy insects or bees, or fish in the ocean or low CO2 in the air.
Anything we can do, we can buy. But it we can’t do it, we can’t buy it.
People forget this, both ways. Both in learned helplessness, as if we couldn’t easily house everyone and feed everyone (the absolute food shortages are in the future): we have massive food subsidies and enough ability to build homes, after all.
Anyone saying ‘we can’t afford’ is either a fool, or feeding you bullshit.
But there are some things we can’t afford, and the number of those things will increase over time.