Economists, some anyway, love models (not the willowy kind in chiffon). Most of the Right Wingnuts always call up the US of 1776 as a model of how the contemporary economic world should be shaped. They also tend to want the laws of the land to revert to what existed then. That's not the sort of model that makes much sense in today's world; not the least because there isn't an endless supply of land a few miles away to be stolen from the indigenous peoples (if we can manage to kill enough of them).
No, the kinds of models that economists prefer are those which simplify the numbers: population, distances, dollar amounts, and the like.
So, here's a model which explains where the Right Wingnuts have taken us since Reagan.
The US is not 330,000,000 but a village of 100. Our millions of goods and services are just bread and water. In this village, each week, is produced 100 loaves of bread and 100 gallons of water. In this village, 1 person takes 23 loaves of bread and 23 gallons of water. The remaining 99 have to divide 77 loaves of bread and gallons of water amongst themselves. It doesn't take much consideration to see that such a village wouldn't last very long. That 1 person would be killed, and the bread and water distributed.
That is our present and our future.
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