The Illusion of Prosperity

The Illusion of Prosperity and the Collapse of the American Auto Dream

There was once a time when owning a car meant freedom, mobility, dignity, and self-determination. It was the working man’s chariot, the blue-collar emblem of independence. Today it has become a gilded cage on wheels, financed by usury and marketed as a lifestyle. The average American now owes his soul to the dealership, the bank, and the bureaucrat, three modern gods of enslavement presiding over what was once the land of the free.

The so-called auto loan crisis, that clinical euphemism disguising moral and institutional rot, has grown into something far worse than an economic downturn. It is a mirror reflecting the degradation of a civilization that once built Cadillacs and now cannot afford a Corolla. The numbers are grotesque: delinquencies have surged by over fifty percent since 2010; the average car costs more than fifty thousand dollars; nearly one in three borrowers owes more than their vehicle is worth. In any sane society, this would be treated as an alarm bell. In ours, it is a line item on a spreadsheet buried beneath “seasonal adjustments” and “soft landings.”

Let's be clear. This crisis is not an accident, nor is it the inevitable byproduct of complex global markets. It is the natural consequence of a deliberate policy of debt-based illusionism, an empire of paper and pixels masquerading as prosperity. The architects of this collapse were not mechanics, machinists, or men who actually make things. They were the money alchemists, the academic courtiers, and the bureaucratic priests of Modern Monetary Theory, the theology of infinite indulgence, where deficits are blessings and inflation is a sign of divine favor.

Modern Monetary Theory, that fashionable superstition of our age, promised that governments could print wealth without consequence. It seduced the intellectual class with the idea that money was not real, merely a token of policy imagination. The result? The dollar, once a symbol of trust and discipline, has become a plaything for clerks and careerists who believe they can conjure prosperity through deficit.

When the pandemic came, they baptized this folly with holy water and called it “stimulus.” Trillions were conjured from nothing, as if the printing press could create value, as if digits on a screen could replace the sweat of honest work. Every false dollar minted was a quiet theft from the working man’s future. Every government check, celebrated as relief, was in truth a promissory note for permanent inflation.

This is the spiritual core of the American crisis: we have replaced production with printing, restraint with indulgence, and accountability with excuses. The state now plays both arsonist and firefighter, first burning the economy through reckless spending, then offering “assistance” to the victims in the form of new debt. It is not economics; it is monetary cannibalism.

The Biden administration did not inherit this crisis; they doubled down on it. Rather than allow the market to self-correct and purge the excesses, they poured kerosene on the fire in the name of “equity,” “climate,” and “recovery.” They strangled American energy production, burdened domestic manufacturing with regulations written by clerks who have never held a wrench, and flooded the system with cheap government credit, all while lecturing the public about sustainability and “shared sacrifice.”

The result is a perfect storm of inflation, scarcity, and debt servitude. Cars are now luxury goods for the upper-middle class, while the working poor drive vehicles worth less than the interest they pay. Auto manufacturers, suffocated by regulatory theater and supply chain chaos, pass their costs to the consumer. Banks, addicted to the drug of guaranteed profit, finance the illusion until it implodes. And when the defaults begin, the political class will feign shock, commission another “study,” and propose another trillion-dollar “solution.”

The delusion of modern America is that the economy can be managed by decree, that wealth can be legislated, growth can be subsidized, and markets can be bullied into virtue. But every law of nature resists arrogance. The price of hubris is always ruin. When you subsidize demand without producing supply, you do not create prosperity; you dilute it. When you inflate credit without restraint, you do not empower citizens; you enslave them to future interest.

We have reached the logical end of decades of bipartisan cowardice: an economy in which even prime borrowers are defaulting. The prudent, the disciplined, and the creditworthy, those once considered safe, are drowning alongside the reckless. This is the hallmark of systemic decay, the inability to distinguish between the virtuous and the imprudent because the entire system rewards neither.

A society that punishes thrift and glorifies debt cannot endure. It rots from within, producing citizens who live as tenants in their own prosperity, beholden to banks, bureaucrats, and the ticking clock of compound interest.

Debt is not merely an economic problem; it is a moral one. It reveals character, or the lack thereof. The modern state has trained its citizens to live beyond their means, to mistake indulgence for growth, and to measure success in terms of borrowed pleasure. This is not prosperity. It is servitude wearing a smile.

The American middle class, once the engine of civilization, has been reduced to a class of indentured consumers. They are too indebted to rebel, too comfortable to repent, and too distracted to notice that the dream has curdled into a trap. Their cars, their mortgages, their student loans, all are chains forged in the forges of “stimulus” and “credit access.”

We no longer have an economy; we have a debt cult. And every cult demands sacrifice.

The coming collapse will not be gentle. It will not be a “market correction.” It will be a moral correction, a reminder that the laws of finance, like the laws of nature, cannot be cheated. The reckoning will arrive quietly at first, through repossessed cars lining suburban driveways, through families walking to work because their mobility was financed on illusion. It will reveal, in the stark light of consequence, the truth that every empire built on fiat dies by inflation.

The politicians will blame the banks. The banks will blame the Fed. The Fed will blame “unexpected market conditions.” But the truth will remain: they all fed the same beast.

The cure for this sickness is not more spending, nor another reform package written by those who caused the problem. It is a return to sanity, to restraint, to savings, to the virtue of saying no when the state offers “free money.” It is the revival of a moral economy grounded in work, production, and personal responsibility.

Until then, Americans will continue to drive cars they do not own, powered by fuel they cannot afford, toward destinations that lead nowhere.

Freedom without responsibility is debt. Wealth without virtue is decay. An economy without discipline is tyranny in disguise.

The auto loan crisis is not about cars; it is about character. And America, for all its horsepower and hubris, has run out of both.