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The Savior State is a compelling fantasy, but it is unsustainable and thus ultimately destructive. Clinging to the hope it will magically become sustainable is one strategy, but it is a strategy with low probabilities of success.

A free community, school, town, group and nation require engagement to remain free (i.e. liberty, not "free" financially). We don't all have to become leaders but we do need to participate. As I write this in September 2009, the citizens of Japan have tossed out a sclerotic, oppressive, exploitative failed status quo at the ballot box. About 70% of the qualified voters participated, compared to the U.S. average of about 40% participation.

Passive debt-serfs will remain debt-serfs. That much is self-evident.

2. Transparency (trust and truth)

Transparency is the public posting of accurate accounts of finances and decisionmaking. As noted above, transparency is anathema to crony capitalism and all Elites, who thrive in secrecy and obscurity.

Transparency is the essential feedback loop of democracy, liberty and free-market capitalism. If transparency is strangled, then liberty, democracy and widespread prosperity expire along with it.

In the household setting, financial transparency starts with an accurate (trustworthy) accounting of the household income, expenses and capital/assets. If a family or individual does not know how much money is being spent and on what, then that lack of transparency cripples cost-benefit analyses and decisionmaking.

As described in a previous chapter, a key goal of the mass media/marketing system is to transform all consumers into permanent adolescents who act on impulse and instant gratification. Permanent adolescence is the opposite of engagement, accountability and an adult understanding.

The decisionmaking processes within a household should also be transparent. Who decides, and based on what information and cost-benefit analysis? If the process is obscure, then how will children learn to make their own cost-benefit analyses and adult decisions? If transparent household cost-benefit trade-offs aren't being made, then how can the household make prudent decisions which create surplus value and capital?

3. Accountability

If people are not accountable for the consequences of their decisions, behaviors and work, then one of the two essential feedback loops is broken (the first essential is transparency). Permanent adolescence attempts to dodge accountability via excuses and rationalizations; just listen to teenagers for endlessly creative (and ultimately tiresome) examples.

In one sense, the entire American system of "justice" has institutionalized permanent adolescence under the guise of "advocacy." In court, advocacy assumes the all-or-nothing dodging of accountability: the authorities/accusers are evil, repressive, out to get us. If that isn't an adolescent voice, then what is?

This perversion of truth aimed at dodging accountability has poisoned the entire culture. Now the guilty deny the truth until indisputable evidence arises, at which point they blubber out a canned apology which is intended to magically relieve them of their original guilt as well as the additional crimes of perjury, libeling the accusers, false accusations, misrepresenting the truth, etc.

Actually facing consequences is deemed "unfair," as the superficial apology is, in typical adolescent fashion, supposed to completely remedy the situation.

Eliminating causal links between performance/behavior and the consequences is ontologically destructive; the spoiled brat, slacker and liar are all rewarded by a system which lacks accountability, while the honest, hardworking and productive are effectively punished.

This was the fundamental reason communes in Communism failed; slackers and cheats drew the same benefits as the productive who had to work harder to compensate for the unproductive.

Thus it is no surprise the U.S. economy and culture is now riddled with protected high-castes, Elites and fiefdoms