Future Faith

Jared Brock
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  • CHRISTIANITY
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A podcast, newsletter, and publication for followers of The Way (and friendly haters) about how to live faithfully in the age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. jaredbrock.substack.com

  1. 11/22/2021

    Interview: Mark Sayers on China, Crypto, Politics, the Future, and the Church

    Hi family, We’re shaking things up on Future Faith today— I’m hosting an interview with Melbourne’s Mark Sayers, author of a half-dozen books and partner-in-crime with John Mark Comer on the This Cultural Moment podcast. Grab a coffee or tea and find an hour to listen to where culture and the church are likely headed. (You can also watch the video version below.) If you’d like to win a free copy of Mark’s newest book, click enter here. Since this is such an important conversation, please consider forwarding this email to the leaders in your life. And if you’re new to Future Faith, welcome! Subscriptions are free: Watch on Youtube: Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 10m

  2. 11/08/2021

    How Corporations Kill Communities

    Every Sunday morning before church for several years, my friends and I used to gather at Locke Street Bakery on Locke Street in Hamilton. The bagels were amazing. Literally handmade. Boiled and fire-baked right before our eyes. Slathered with homemade cream cheese, smoked salmon, the works. Served by women in their forties and fifties who we knew by name. LSB was a blue-collar institution in a run-down neighborhood, and for decades it faithfully served its equally faithful clientele. LSB was so good, in fact, that it started attracting other local businesses. A funky hair salon opened across the street. A butcher shop did the same. A bookshop. A florist. And then, one day — once all the signs suggested this neighborhood was about to pop — Starbucks moved into the neighborhood. It was all downhill from there. Corporations can’t create culture. Corporations aren’t real. They’re just legal fictions; anti-human institutions that live forever, have more rights than people, and exist solely to extract wealth from employees, suppliers, consumers, and taxpayers. Corporations can’t and don’t create culture because culture is natural, organic, biological, creative. It’s why people use Airbnb/steal real family homes instead of staying at hotels. Marriott can’t fake home. It’s why all the top restaurants in the world aren’t chains. Real human chefs surprise and delight patrons with new and living flavors. McDonald’s and Starbucks, on the other hand, are continually “innovating,” but it all tastes roughly the same because the bottom line goal isn’t creative expression, it’s profit. If you’ve ever been to a corporate “community event” or witnessed a corporate-created “grassroots campaign,” you know exactly what I mean. Everything’s a bit sanitized and clean and proper and nice and… off. That’s because corporations aren’t relational — they’re transactional. They can’t give freely and creatively. Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take. And human beings can smell it from a mile away. The Corporate Colonization Cycle Because corporations can’t create culture, they have to play succubus to a living host, hoovering resources out of fledgling local ecosystems. To put it another way, corporations have to find real culture creators who are building meaningful neighborhoods, and then slip in their stores to get in on the action before the culture-creators get pushed out and move elsewhere. Unlike one-of-a-kind local businesses that keep 100% of their profits spinning in their neighborhood and attract outside money, multinationals do the opposite: They siphon money from local communities to faraway elite shareholders, and make everywhere so similar and boring that it drives people away from once-thriving pockets of real culture. In the case of Starbucks and hundreds of other multinational monster brands, they literally have teams of people who research up-and-coming areas to determine the best place to install their wealth-extracting hoses. The corporate colonization cycle happens all over the world: * Ernest Hemingway shops at a bookstore, and suddenly Shakespeare and Co. is a lifeless global brand. * Mennonites create St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, then Walmart builds just feet across the county line to benefit from all the visitors. * A trunkmaker named Louis Vuitton crafted high-quality bags, now a hyper-capitalist billionaire leverages the name to buy out seventy competitor brands. * Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre chatted philosophy at a run-down restaurant, now Café de Flores is overrun by celebrities and narcissistic Instagramers. * Two centuries ago, Vincent Van Gogh used a certain sketchbook made of moleskin, and in 1997 an Italian papermaker created an overpriced knock-off version that’s now owned by a Belgian glass repair company. The corporate colonization cycle is simple and heartbreaking: People create culture → Corporations kill culture. As Andy Crouch so eloquently points out in his book Culture Making: “It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided “culture wars.” But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.” Clearly, we are living in an anti-culture. By definition, an individualist culture or a corporatist culture is an anti-culture. But who on earth is better at building de-commodified cultures than followers of Jesus? We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Sadly, most modern “churches” have actually adopted the corporate model, and are now little more than nationally-registered charities seen more for who they hate than who they help. In Jeremiah 29:7, Yahweh tells the Israelite captives in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.” We Christians are, of course, all living in exile in a foreign land, and like the ancient Israelites, are awaiting our deliverance and our true home.  But in the meantime, let’s culture-make. This means contributing, not consuming or colonizing or extracting. Let’s build communities and companies and villages and cities and countries that look nothing like their secularist-individualist counterparts. Let’s give the world a glimpse of what heaven might be like. Here’s Andy Crouch again: “So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.” After Starbucks moved to Locke Street, everything changed. House prices tripled, driving out the working poor. Antique shops bloomed like mold on week-old bread. Airbnbs popped up like brain tumors. The streets got cleaner, safer, more sanitized. Surveillance cameras showed up in shop windows. Pretty soon, crowds of aging female shoppers arrived, all looking to be part of this exciting new “neighborhood.” Little did the tourists know as they ordered their flat whites at Starbucks, but Locke Street had already died. All the real culture-creators had moved to James Street and Ottawa Street and Cannon Street. And, after serving as the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul for decades, Locke Street Bakery closed. It got bought out by a capitalist couple who moved the bakery to a lifeless warehouse in the suburbs and tried to make LSB a brand to sell in stores. All those sweet bagel-serving women were fired. (I miss you, Sue.) When the capitalists eventually realized that no one was interested in frozen bagels, they turned the former storefront into a lifeless vegan cafe staffed with why-are-you-even-talking-to-me Millennials. Ironically, they called the restaurant Democracy. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  3. 11/02/2021

    "You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy" Is Just Feudalism 2.0

    The elites hate you. It’s not personal. They just do. Some think the elites are just indifferent to us, but they aren’t. The words “love” and “hate” are not merely theoretical notions — they are verbs. Elites hated your ancestors, too. Whether your ancestors were African slaves in the New World (especially in Brazil), or serfs under the British aristocracy, or peasants under the Russian Tsars, or slaves under the Chinese dynasties, elites have extracted time and wealth from your family since before recorded history. Until essentially the end of World War I, elites owned everything. Take, for instance, the East India Company. A staff of 35 people controlled the fate of more than 100 million Indians from a five-window office in London. Lack of ownership for the masses — that was the problem. (Well, you know, aside from the fact that the heart is desperately wicked, as Jeremiah points out.) Whenever elites own everything, everyone else is shackled to horrible jobs just to survive, while the elites live in obscene luxury with no thought to the misery and suffering of the masses. Sound familiar? In the wake of the global pandemic, today’s elites are taking back the planet they believe rightfully belongs to them, and putting the rest of us back where they believe we belong: In economic chains. The Great Reset In January 2021, the hyper-elitist World Economic Forum — hosted by Prince Charles and sponsored by glowing anti-democratic monopolists including Blackrock and JPMorgan — held its 50th annual meeting from the Alpine slopes of Davos, Switzerland. The theme was The Great Reset, a proposal to rebuild the economy “sustainably” in the wake of COVID-19. Right. Even billionaire-obsessed Forbes Magazine had to admit their agenda was “another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful.” In the WEF video 8 Predictions For The World In 2030, the very first prediction is: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” As the WEF explained on its website: [By 2030] all products will have become services. “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two. Notice the implicit threat towards the end? Play ball or suffer. And if the elites have their way, you won’t own your own underwear in nine years or less. Slavery by another name This, of course, begs the question: If we won’t own anything… who will? The answer is obvious: The elites will. And they’ll rent it back to us for top dollar. Whatever “the market” can bear. But obviously, what the market can bear and what the people can bear are two different things entirely. Interestingly, a societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to work for elites just to stay alive already has a name: It’s called feudalism. Feudalism 2.0 Have you noticed that the economy is rapidly shape-shifting? During the pandemic, billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion to their net worth. If you chart the trajectory and do the math, you’ll discover elites will control the entire global economy within our lifetime. Sadly, the goal of today’s elites is the same as their ancestors: To enslave the world in order to extract the maximum amount of time and wealth from every living being. Ownership matters Without ownership, America’s 115,656,681 renters are at the whims of cruel land-lorders and Airbnb takeovers. Without ownership, all of Tesla’s 70,000 employees miss out on their $14 million stake in the company they created, while Elon Musk makes $36 billion in a single day. Without ownership, millions of Walmart employees struggle to feed their families, while the billionaire Walton family enjoys corporate socialism on an unprecedented scale. Without ownership, people pay ever-increasing gas prices to get to work, the bottom billion go to bed hungry because of the slightest increase in grain prices, women and children prostitute their bodies to make ends me, and a million people globally move into slums every single day. Without ownership, we don’t get to own stuff. Not our houses, cars, clothes, music, movies, furniture, appliances, or books. Everything becomes pay-per-use. And if you can’t pay, you don’t get to use it. No matter what it is. Without ownership, every single one of us lives and dies by the market: * When the price of energy spikes 180X during a Texas blizzard, you can either freeze to death or take on a lifetime of debt. * When the price of housing rises to $10 million in our lifetime, you can live on the streets or work three underpaid jobs just to keep a rotting roof over your head. * When your child develops a life-threatening condition and private health insurance denies part or all of your claim, you can let your kid die or declare bankruptcy along with hundreds of thousands of other American families every single year. * When the market price of water moves beyond what you can afford (due to systemic inequalities beyond your control) the CEO of Nestlé thinks you don’t deserve to drink water. Without ownership, people don’t have stakes in the game. They aren’t invested. They become rogue actors, prone to dissent and violence and chaos. And why not? They didn’t sign up to play real-life monopoly. Why not smash the board and shatter the pieces? The end game You’re probably wondering… What’s the point of Feudalism 2.0? Is it really worth the hassle of re-taking total ownership of the global economy and forcing the masses back into serfdom? It’s not like it’ll win you friends, make you happy, or let you live forever. So why bother? Because elites are sad, broken, and delusional. They think that adding extra zeroes on their net worth will somehow give them peace of mind, contentment, true friendship, love, respect, and life purpose. And because owning the world can’t and won’t satisfy, once the masses are crushed, elites will continue their bloody game of thrones until the day they die. In a winner-take-all world, only one person can win. The irony of ownership Christians, of course, don’t believe in human ownership at all. It’s absurd to us that something as temporary as a homo sapien thinks they can own something so “permanent” as a piece of a planet. We know that God owns everything. And that we’re just stewards. Our mission is to take care of everything and everyone; to give Him all the glory; to live out His will and calling; to proclaim the good news; to make life on earth as it is in heaven and let His kingdom come in our lives and families and cities and nations. When hundreds of millions of Christians do this, everything changes. The presence of God floods the earth. Justice rolls down like a mighty tide. Grace unites enemies. Truth gets a seat at the table. People become wildly generous. Instead of competing, people start cooperating and sharing life and resources as though they share a common father and a common inheritance. It’s exactly the opposite of what the elites want. It’s time to go to war with the elites There are three earthly things we can do to resist the great reset. And remember, if they have their way, it’s less than nine years until you won’t own your underwear. 1. Vote with your time and money The polls can’t and won’t save you from the corporations that control Congress. We have to bankrupt them. The only way to do that is to stop giving them your money. No more shopping, no more banking, no more enriching predator corporations. Go local and independent. Support Christian businesses. Start Christian businesses. Invest in Christian businesses.  (You can also join the national strike that’s currently underway, refusing to contribute your time and talent to enrich multinational extractors.) 2. Amass owned assets, help others do the same, and never sell I’m talking productive businesses, houses, land, building supplies, water sources, power generation, renewable lumber, animals, seeds. Real wealth. Just be sure to check your stock portfolio and cleanse it of all unrighteousness. And while you’re at it, download every movie and song that you ever hope to watch/listen to more than twice. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to rent these things for top dollar, and in doing so, further enrich the most corrupt institutions and people on earth. And isn’t one of our jobs as Christians to participate in as little evil as possible? 3. Get offline and build real relationships with real people We need to build resilient micro-societies. And modern monasteries. And cities. And countries — entirely new anti-corporate, pro-commons sovereignties. We need more community. We need more friends. We need more family. When Feudalism 2.0 takes over the economy, we serfs are going to need each other. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  4. 11/01/2021

    The World Needs Far Less Facebook, Not More by a Different Name

    Last week, someone offered to pay me $500 to write a short Medium article about their new NFT startup. That’s a lot of money for someone with a brand new baby at home. The company “sends” its “community” on a different digital “travel experience” each month. One month everyone will digitally attend Coachella or Burning Man, another time they’ll go to the Superbowl or the NBA Finals. It’s a really cool idea, until you think about it for like four seconds. I wrote back: “Dear [so and so]. Sorry to say I can’t support your project. It’s anti-human. If you’ve read much of my blog, you know that I’m deeply pro-human. Biological. Offline. Together. [Your company] separates people. It keeps them from going on real adventures to real places to spend real offline time with real people. My post-college volunteering trip through Central America changed my life and made me friends for life. [Your company] is the opposite of what human beings need. I hope you’ll seriously re-think this business.” It was the easiest $500 I’ve never made. New name, same game Facebook is changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc. It’s stupid, I know. But then again, so is wasting 2.39 years of waking life on Facebook, so can the average user really judge them? As most of my long-time readers know, I’m not a fan of the highly-addictive, extremist-breeding, time-devouring, money-gobbling, democracy-smashing, depression-inducing, hatred-boosting sludgefest that is Facebook. Now, in an attempt to distance Facebook from its endless crimes and scandals, kid billionaire/Sith lord Mark Zuckerberg has decided that burning 76,450,684 years of human life each year in two dimensions is no longer enough. No, in his profit-focused mind, it’s time for Facebook’s 1.908 billion daily active users to enter the Metaverse — in other words, he wants to further separate us from each other, but this time, in virtual reality. In order to create “connection.” In order words, the lie that built Facebook is about to go exponential. The trillion-dollar vision Facebook is built on an extremely simple and profound promise: That if we will all spend more time alone staring at a screen, freely hand over our identities, and let an algorithm change our beliefs and behaviors, Facebook will deliver connection. And guess what? Facebook delivered. Extremely well: * Old classmates who’d lost touch (for a reason) suddenly knew what each other were up to. * Grandparents got to see their faraway grandbabies. * Former colleagues got to argue about who stole the election from whom. * During lockdown, everyone got to see how bored everyone else was. * Oh, and millions of couples had affairs, with 20% of divorce cases now involving Facebook. So yes, we connected. But there’s a fundamental problem with Facebook’s unique selling proposition: There’s a massive difference between connection and communion. Facebook promises connection and hopes we won’t realize that connection isn’t actually what we want, need, or crave. In the same way that Americans conflate autonomy with freedom, Mark Zuckerberg conflates connection with communion. Humans don’t “connect.” We aren’t USB keys.We aren’t wifi signals.We aren’t prongs that plug into outlets. Machines connect. Humans commune. Communion I don’t know anyone who’s logged off of Facebook feeling euphoric, content, or fulfilled. Statistically speaking, most users log off either more depressed or more enraged. Facebook is like McDonald’s — it’s temporarily satisfying because of the saccharine sugar hit, but it ultimately leaves you hungry within hours, craving another hit. Communion, on the other hand, is different. When people meet face to face, magic happens. We smell each other. Hear each other without compression. We breathe in each other’s pheromones. Our breathing syncs. Our heart rates rise.Our faces flush.We really communicate.We can sense nuance, subtlety, jest.We subconsciously see each other’s pupils dilate.We touch each other, hold each other, feel each other.We know and are known. And not one advertiser, including Russian trolls and conspiracy theorists, can pay to plant 36 thoughts in our heads. More of the same “The metaverse is the next frontier… From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.” — Mark Zuckerberg The metaverse is wildly overrated. It’s basically highly-addictive social media in virtual or augmented reality. That’s right — either we’ll spend our hours inside Facebook’s digital world, or Facebook will invade our physical world. Either way, its algorithms will continue to get to know us better than our family, bombarding us with ads whether we’re aware of them or not, manipulating our behavior for the betterment not of ourselves and our communities, but for the bottom-line profits of elite shareholders on the hunt for more and more Zuckerbucks. You thought Facebook wars on comment walls were bad? Now people will be able to see and scream at each other in digital town halls. The metaverse is simply yet another attempt at trying to create heaven on earth without God. It’s the kingdom without the king, the cathedral without the cornerstone. It just won’t work. Because even a shiny new metaverse will be filled with sinful human beings. In the end, it will be just more of the same. Sorry, MarkyZ. We are homo sapiens, not homo digitalis. We are proudly biological, offline, and physical. God created us this way. We were made to be together, in the flesh. Sure, God made us incredibly resilient, but we weren’t made to sit sedentarily and stare at a small square of light all day. And we definitely weren’t designed to strap a screen to our face and “live” inside an ad-filled world created by a sociopath. Christians don’t need to resist the metaverse so much as they just need to focus on our work as culture-makers in the real world. Undoubtedly, a few tech-obsessed pastors will attempt to create VR churches, but these will almost certainly fail in time. People in VR are looking to be entertained, not discipled. It would be like trying to sell haircuts in a carwash. I’m not saying we can’t and shouldn’t use technology as a way to bridge into culture and evangelize, but there comes a point when these connections need to be pulled offline into the real world in order to truly become healthy relationships. Christian parents especially need to wake up and learn to parent and disciple their children. It’s an unbelievable mistake to give anyone under eighteen a smartphone, and soon children will be pushing for a VR headset so they can “live” where all their friends do.  Parents, guardians, and church leaders need to do a far better job at giving kids and teens places that help them feel they are home — with their faith family and in the presence of God.  To be clear, we don’t need to try and compete with the metaverse; Christianity isn’t a “pitch,” and literally nothing competes with digital superstimuli except perhaps narcotics. We’re not offering the world a buzz — we’re living out the life that is truly life. And true life isn’t the metaverse. Let’s never forget that Facebook (and VR, and AR and the metaverse) were created not to improve human life and achieve widest-spread wellbeing. It was and will always be about shareholder profits. Leaked documents have proved conclusively that Mark Zuckerberg does not care about the wellbeing of our global family. Like all of us, Mark cares above all for himself. So please lift him up in your prayers. People say that power corrupts, but I disagree. Power magnifies what’s already there. Mark Zuckerberg is just as broken and sinful as the rest of us, he’s just in a bigger spotlight, and he’s operating with more tools and weapons that impact billions of lives. As trust in Facebook Inc. continues to sink lower and lower, the Chief Exploitation Officer thinks he can rebrand as Meta Platforms Inc. and double down on a thesis that never worked in the first place. Facebook is built on the false promise that spending more time alone on screens will somehow deliver the communion we want, need, and crave. It hasn’t, won’t, can’t, and never will. Get full access to Future Faith at jaredbrock.substack.com/subscribe

    11 min

  5. 10/25/2021

    10 Signs America Is Headed for Certain Collapse

    Hello brothers and sisters, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss ten signs that America is headed for certain collapse. Superpowers aren’t impressive. Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Egypt, Britain, Spain, Portugal; they’ve all ruled the world for a time before sliding back to just regular-ol’-nation status. Now it’s America’s turn. The United States is going to collapse. This isn’t a fear-mongering statement. Just a fact. Everyone knows it. Whether in five years or fifty, the days of America-as-global-superpower are numbered. In the same way that Rome pulled back its troops from Alexandria in Egypt and the Scottish borders in Britain, the American military-industrial complex will continue the work started in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw its 800 global military bases in order to make a last-ditch effort to enslave its own people in a soft-totalitarian panopticon surveillance state. And then it will collapse. Diehard nationalists insist it could never happen, but the signs of American collapse are obvious: 1. Wealth inequality American income inequality is growing, too. Higher than the Roman Empire’s, in fact. The stats on wealth inequality are crazy. Please read them all. Nevermind the Gilded Age of corporate tyrants like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller — today’s billionaires control more wealth and political power than the monopolists of the past could ever have dreamed. Christians, of course, live by a different economic policy: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And while extreme right-wingers are quick to shout “Communism! Socialism!” they fail to realize we’re not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on. 2. Debt The numbers are staggering: * America has nearly $29 trillion in federal debt. * Total consumer debt sits at $14.9 trillion. * Half a million American families are systemically forced into bankruptcy every year. Don’t listen to those nutty Modern Monetary Theory boosters who think we can pile up debt forever and it will never destroy our society. The bell will toll, and it will toll for us. Don’t get me wrong, the MMTers are technically right — we can print money forever. But every unbacked printed dollar erodes trust and purchasing power. When society is built on a literal lie, it’s only a matter of time before it falls. Because only the truth can set us free. 3. Economic Instability Because of how hyper-elites have structured the economy, we’re stuck with permanent economic instability — insane asset bubbles, followed by massive crashes that hurt those who a.) didn’t benefit in the good times, and b.) suffer most in the bad times. While it’s never occurred to the corporations who control our countries, people want to live in economically stable places. Because America refuses to deliver on true, long-term economic stability for the majority, it’s no wonder we’re currently seeing a national strike, and why many of us with the power to do so have already moved overseas. 4. Homeownership in Crisis Rentership, too. I’ve been sounding the alarm on this one for a while — people have no idea the tidal wave that’s about to shatter the American middle class once and for all. House prices are going to $10 million in our lifetime, and if we don’t ban for-profit residential real estate investment and overthrow the corrupt zoning boards that keep young families from building homes they can afford, we will see a houselessness crisis never witnessed before in human history.  There is a massive opportunity for the real-estate-rich Western church to become a global leader on affordable homeownership, but sadly, the church is asleep at the wheel. 5. Crony Corporate Politics Democracy, of course, has never existed in America, but the corporate oligarchy now owns Congress lock, stock, and barrel, including the Federal Reserve which is in charge of the economy. There’s honestly no point in voting unless it’s with your money. 6. Environmental Instability When I was younger, my wife and I visited Tikal in Guatemala, the New York City of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. They destroyed their environment, and then it destroyed them. It’s really simple: Nations that don’t protect people, wildlife, soil, water, and air eventually go extinct. It’s not personal, it’s science. As commenter Nikos Papakonstantinou put it: You can’t eat, drink, or breathe money. It takes 1,000 years for nature to grow 3cm of topsoil, and America has managed to burn through several feet in the past century. Now, America only has sixty harvests left. (An excellent book on the topic is Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization.) Some Christians are starting to realize the importance of creation care and the huge opportunities it could afford us to connect with people on their way to God, but sadly, strong leadership has yet to emerge on this front. 7. The Vampire Economy Let’s face it, the American productive economy is dead. Most of the major brands are zombie companies that burn cash and have never been profitable a day in their short-lived corporate lives. Rather than producing products and services of real value, corporate America is just a giant game of extractivism, a dung pile of rent-seeking skimmers who blood-suck time and wealth from the productive poor while contributing nothing of real value: * Landlords * Bankers * Stock investors * Crypto speculators who would rather treat Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme instead of freedom money to stave off abhorrent central bank surveillance currencies. When a nation stops creating real value and starts eating itself like a snake, its days are mathematically numbered. There have been several seasons in history where Christian businesspeople have practiced nobless oblige — the obligation to help those in need, and we certainly need a renaissance of that holy task. 8. Mass Hysteria Looking at you, anti-vaxxers. And Q-Anoners. And cancel culturists. And people who vote for Republicans and Democrats. America is now filled with conspiracy theorists and people who draw the line and refuse to dialogue with people outside of their own box. This signals a total breakdown in personal understanding, civic goodwill, institutional trust, and national unity. 9. Screen Addiction The invention of the smartphone will surely go down in history as one of the most destructive pieces of technology ever invented. Homo sapiens are in no way adapted for the super-stimulus of digital outputs. Between social media, streaming, porn, gaming, and shopping addictions, we’re breaking our necks, frying our eyes, and shattering any sense of offline meaning or belonging. Just wait until Gen Z and Gen Alpha are in charge. 10. Individualism America is a culture (from the Latin cultus, where we derive the word “cult”) built on the myth of rugged individualism, of “one for me, and all for me.” It’s a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, loser-dies-in-poverty cult where the rich prey on the poor and the masses suffer so the elites can live a little better a little longer. America is a piece of glass that has been shattered into 331 million shards, each stabbing the next in a frantic fight for survival. Only a hard fire can forge the pieces back together. It’s quite telling that the period of largest church attendance in history — and the greatest period of peace and wealth and democracy — came out of the ashes of World War II. Naturally, there are those who believe a Canadian living in Europe shouldn’t have the right to comment on America at all, but of course, those people are usually nationalists who fail to see we live in a hyper-connected world where everyone’s choices affect everyone else. The failure to understand this is yet another symptom of hyper-individualism. America is a fractured, atomized nation, with each member so hell-bent on self-actualization, obsessed with concocting a singularly unique identity, and blinded by the idea that autonomy and freedom are the same thing. Because the nation cannot fathom it shares one common freedom, it simply cannot surrender any amount of selfhood to the collective, despite the fact that human togetherness is the #1 thing correlated to human happiness. God made us for each other. The end isn’t the end All empires fall. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s just a matter of when, how, and how hard. Collapse doesn’t mean disappearance. And it doesn’t necessarily mean a total dystopian hellscape like the movie The Book of Eli. But it does mean a loss of global superpower status and all the unfair advantages that came along with it, like currency supremacy and cheap goods. It means a country seriously diminished, greatly impoverished, wracked with crime and disease and exploitation, and subject to the whims of foreign corporatists hell-bent on extraction. You know, like much of the rest of the world. Normally, my articles outline a challenge facing society and offer some proposals for how to fix it. This is one of those rare posts that just points out the macro factors that will lead to the inevitable fall of America, and how Christians simply aren’t rising to the task at hand. Collapse shouldn’t sit well with Christians, because human beings who are made in the image of God will suffer. Everyone needs to be working on solutions for challenges big and small. (And yes, peacefully turning the American landmass into a dozen or so new nations is highly preferable to a bloody second civil war.) The goal, of course, isn’t to maintain a hyper-violent military empi

    15 min

  6. 10/20/2021

    Are You Ready To Become a Monk?

    Welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack: Every morning I go on a walk past a river, beside a centuries-old working millpond, into a graveyard and apple-laden church ground, and through the ruins of a twelfth-century abbey. If you walk around my village, you’ll see dozens of houses that are made of the exact same stones as the former abbey. There’s a reason for this: When Henry VIII dissolved all the monasteries and started his own church in order to self-bless his murder of innocent women, locals in my village stole the monastery’s rocks. The faded tourist sign says that the locals treated the monastery as a “convenient quarry.” A convenient quarry. That’s Christianity vs. Secularism in a nutshell, isn’t it? Because it’s inherently consumerist, post-modernity loves to harvest what Christians first cultivated: * Hospitals * Universities * Human rights * Universal basic income Secularism wants the kingdom without the king, the light without the power, the cathedral without the cornerstone. Monasteries What do you picture when you hear the word “monk?” Old men in black robes?Old women in white robes? Why not a young bearded brewer who brews beer for the glory of God?Why not a stay-at-home dad who adores children and wants to adopt a dozen orphans?Why not a working mom who erects houses for the benefit of people who would never qualify for a mortgage? What do you picture when you hear the word “monastery?” A rotting stone building, utterly detached from the world? Why not a vibrant house, street, neighborhood, village, or city? When I hear the word “monastery,” I envision an estate. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he sold their buildings and land to whichever local elite offered the most cash. This allowed the British aristocracy to amass vast estates, with thousands of those plundered monasteries still owned by those same families to this day. (There are 144 estates over 10,000 acres in Scotland alone.) Michelle and I have visited dozens of estates on various outings around the UK: * Chatsworth (1,822 acres, down from 200,000) invented the banana we all know and love. * Buccleuch (217,000 acres) raises 19,670 sheep, 700 cattle, 32,000 hens, and 117 red deer hinds. * Atholl (124,000 acres) hosts weddings and functions, has a trailer park, and does castle tours. * Highclere (5,000 acres) shot to fame as the shooting location for Downton Abbey. When I picture a modern monastery, I picture a not-for-profit sustainable estate — studded with dozens of villages and hundreds of people — being run by kingdom principles for kingdom purposes. The kingdom economy The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us. But not in the Acts 4 church, where there were “no needy people among them.” And not in today’s monasteries, either. For nearly 1,700 years, Christian monks and nuns have practiced Universal Basic Income. In my travels, I’ve visited monasteries in Greece, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, and elsewhere. I’ve been to many of the great foundations, including Monte Cassino, Assisi, Subiaco, etc. Monasteries are the last place in Christendom that still practice koinonia, the ancient and subversive Acts 2 practice that radically set apart the early church from the rest of society. Koinonia is often translated as “community” or “fellowship,” but both are really terrible translations. “Brotherhood” and “communion” come closer, but the best description of koinonia might be “non-political spiritual communism.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. This isn’t forced or coerced secularist state-implemented communism. We know that doesn’t work. This is a Holy Spirit-led sharing of life.  It is a communal life the world can never know or re-create.  In monasteries, koinonia looks like this: Everyone works a reasonable amount of time (typically 4–6 hours each day, 5–6 days each week) and contributes 100% of the proceeds to the monastery. The abbot and his team then ensure that everyone’s needs are provided for: food, clothing, shelter, medical, soul care. No one is wealthy, but everyone is rich. The impossibility of individuality Just like biblical churches, monasteries aren’t democracies. The abbot or abbess (from “abba,” meaning father) is in charge. All the brothers or sisters put their faith in Christ and their trust in their abbot, and he is to lead them well — not as coercive politicians do, but as a true servant-hearted leader. That’s why most rich Westerners — single or otherwise — will never enter a monastery. It requires submission and surrender to a communal cause. How will they know us? I wish Christians were more like Jews and Muslims. You can always spot a Jew in the crowd. She’s the one with gorgeous hair and the husband with the yarmulke. You can always spot a Muslim in the crowd. They’re the ones not eating until sundown. I’m not saying we should cover our women or face east at sunset. You know what I mean. Christians are barely discernible. There’s only ever been one marker that really separates Christians from our neighbors — unconditional love, even for those who hate us. But are we loving radically enough to make the world take notice in this attention culture? Where are all the disturbing Christians? Why don’t people leave our presence feeling deeply unsettled? Being around Christians should feel conspiratorial, revolutionary, even dangerous. After all, we serve a God who wants to change everything. There is some biblical precedence for the concept of monasticism: * Elijah fled to the desert during a time of great persecution, and communed with God until the day he was called the restore the kingdom to their heavenly king. * Yahweh sent Moses and the Israelites into forty years of desert wanderings in order to shake off the mental shackles of slavery and prepare them for life as a free people. * John the Baptist counterintuitively moved to the desert to become an evangelist and prepare the way for his cousin Jesus. * If you study the life of Jesus, note how many times Christ removed himself “to a desolate place.” Notice how all of these “monks” were incredibly connected to God and deeply invested in the renewal of the world? Notice how setting themselves apart actually allowed them to dive into culture and make a greater impact? It’s almost as though Christians are supposed to retreat in order to advance. Let’s face it: Churches haven’t been churches in a long time. Worship bands and motivational preachers and fancy buildings take precedence over sharing our wealth, living a rule of life in community, and housing the poor. It’s almost as if the monastery is a place of reformation and preparation for the next move of God in our lives and our culture. First Egypt When most people think about monasteries, they assume it’s just a retreat from “reality.” And it definitely can be that. But that wasn’t the original intention, not by a mile. Inspired by Elijah and John the Baptist, monastics like Anthony the Great renounced the brutality, injustice, and oppression of the Egyptian mega-cities and moved to the desert to practice a Christ-centered life. Pachomius developed the idea of monks living together, and in doing so, creating an alternate social structure to stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the world. In an age before the Internet, social media, and viral videos, more than 50,000 people joined the Egyptian desert fathers and created what became known as Cities of God. From there, the movement went viral, spreading all over the planet. Monasteries aren’t retreats— they’re just new garden cities where the presence of God is actually welcomed. Because monastics renounce individualism and work together as humans were meant to do, it means they inevitably become places of great art and culture, both attracting outsiders and sending people back out. A nowhere always becomes a somewhere when Someone shows up. Then Italy A college student named Benedict of Nursia grew so horrified by city life in Rome that he moved to the ruins of Nero’s villa at Subiaco.  Living by the simple rule of “ora et labora” (pray and work), Benedict founded twelve communities in all, laid the groundwork for Western monasticism, and single-handedly saved Western civilization from extinction. Benedict shapes every single day of our lives, and you can trace a direct line from Benedict’s communities to the faith transformation of hundreds of millions of people over the past 1,500 years. A nowhere became a somewhere when Someone showed up. Then Germany In 1722, Nicolaus Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf bought a huge estate from his grandmother and invited several hundred Christian refugees to build a village on a corner of his estate. The Herrnhut story is now world-famous, especially the 24/7 prayer meeting that lasted for more than a century and sparked America’s Great Awakening. The community sent out hundreds of missionaries to all parts of the world, ministering to slaves in the West Indies and the Inuit in Greenland. They founded a denomination that still has over 1,000 congregations. They played a vital role in the salvation of John Wesley, whose ministry has impacted tens of millions of hearts. One estate — one monastery — continues to impact lives nearly three centuries later. A nowhere became a somewhere when Someone showed up. Monasticism has problems As usual, religion crept in, always ready and willing to replace real leaps of faith. The monks in many monasteries I’ve visited get up far too early, hours before the sun, as though it’s somehow “godly” to ignore the natural rhythms by which God saw

    19 min

  7. 10/16/2021

    Why Do We Allow Infinite Wealth Accumulation?

    Jeff Bezos controls Amazon. And Whole Foods. And The Washington Post. And IMDB, Zappos, Souq, Blue Origin, Kiva Systems, Alexa, DPReview, Fabric.com, Woot, Goodreads, Twitch, Audible, Elemental, Quidsi, Annapurna Labels, Accept, Living Social, Twilio, HomeGrocer, Bill Me Later, eZiba, BankBazaar, Kozmo, Ionic, Songza, and Wine.com. Plus he has VC stakes in Lookout, Juno, Grail, Workday, Vessel, Domo, Fundbox, Stack Overflow, Everfi, Remitly, Rethink Robotics, General Fusion, MakerBot, Unity Biotech, General Assembly, Business Insider, Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter. And he’s working on acquiring MGM. Plus he owns at least eight mansions and 100,000+ acres, a bunch of penis-shaped rockets, and a $500,000,000 hyper-yacht. Bernard Arnault controls LVMH, which has swallowed more than seventy of its competitors, including Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Dom Pérignon, Loius Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loro Piana, Princess Yachts, Bulgari, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns massive chunks of nearly fifty companies including Apple, Amazon, Amex, Bank of America, Chevron, Kraft, Mastercard, Sirius, Visa, Wells Fargo, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, GM, Merck, T-Mobile, GEICO, and Coca-Cola, which itself has eaten more than 400 competing drink companies. Blackrock, which owns a piece of 5,480 companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, JP Morgan, Paypal, Home Depot, Disney, Exxon, Pfizer, Pepsi, AT&T, Nike, Walmart, McDonald’s, Costco, and Netflix, just bought Reese Witherspoon’s media company for $900 million, adding to its $9 trillion Smaug-like horde. It makes you wonder when monopolists will stop growing larger and larger. And then one day it occurs to you… They will not stop until they are stopped. The facts There are now 2,755 billionaires on the planet, not including “royalty” and dictators. In the year 2000, they controlled less than $1 trillion. Today, they control more than $13.1 trillion. 13.5X in a generation. And they’ve grown their wealth by $5.5 trillion during the pandemic so far. The world’s richest eight men now own more than the bottom 4 billion. On the flip side, there’s never been so many people experiencing suffering and deprivation in human history: * Systemic inequality pushed 200+ million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020. * 690 million people go to bed hungry every night (and the number is rising by 16 million per year.) * 5.5 million people are moving into slums per month. * 2.3 million children die from malnutrition every year. Clearly, there is no limit to the depth of poverty and deprivation to which our global society will allow humans to fall — never forget that millions of children are still trafficked for rape annually and that nine million people die from starvation each year — yet somehow elite individuals are allowed to amass unlimited plenty in a world of deprivation? It begs the question: Is it moral and right for us to allow individuals to hoard extreme wealth in the face of overwhelming widespread poverty, documented democratic subversion, and environmental catastrophe? If humanity saw itself as the global family that it truly is, it would be morally impossible to not limit the amount that one family member could control while another suffered and died. “Earned” wealth It is impossible for an individual to legitimately earn a billion dollars. If someone earned $100 per hour — more than enough for anyone to live in luxurious comfort — in order to truly earn a billion dollars, they’d have to work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for five thousand years. So how is a billion dollars actually amassed? By skimming a profit off the backs of untold others: * off the workers they employ * off the suppliers they squeeze * off the carcasses of the competitors they destroy with monopoly * off the planet they unsustainably extract from * off the governments from which they gain subsidies and advantages * off the stable societies they sell to while evading taxation * off the democracies whose rules they change at will * off the shareholders they dupe How is the ability to skim achieved? Through unfair advantage and privilege. It is impossible to “work hard, save, and invest” your way to a billion dollars. Let’s be crystal clear: billionaires don’t “create jobs.” They extract value — time, talent, creativity, effort — from others at an industrial scale. Decentralize everything Here’s a short thought experiment. Which is better: 2,755 billionaires and their $13.1 trillion, each monopolizing roughly one industry apiece and subverting democracy, or 131,000 centa-millionaires in competition? How about 1,310,000 deca-millionaires? Or 13,100,000 millionaires? 13.1 million millionaires would do far more for the economy in terms of spending, hiring, diffusing power, avoiding democratic destruction, increasing competition, and sparking innovation. Are there truly enough benefits to the global population to merit supporting the costs of maintaining billionaires? Surely not. No rational person can make the argument that 2,755 billionaires are globally preferable to having 13.1 million more millionaires, or 131 million more workers each controlling a $100K stake in the businesses wherein they constitute all of the wealth-creation. “But those poor billionaires are just rich on paper!” Sychophants for the ultra-elite are quick to cry out that most billionaires don’t actually have $1,000,000,000+ sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-style vault. Their wealth is usually tied up in shares of the companies they almost always undemocratically control. But these people don’t understand how billionaires work. Billionaires borrow colossal amounts of cheap debt against those paper shares, and let inflation devalue that debt over time. So you and I — the real taxpayers in society — end up footing the bill as the money-printing machine devalues our actual-earned money. We need a more equitable pre-distribution of ownership, wealth, and opportunity. Mathematical doom I believe — as do most of the working masses and the desperate poor — that it is morally wrong and utterly inhumane to be a billionaire whilst millions starve and billions suffer. Full stop. To paraphrase the Bible: “The poor will always be among us because the rich will always be above us.” The world and planet can’t afford to support billionaires anymore. Corporatism is a gross inefficiency and major source of economic inequality; it is anti-democracy; it is ecological unsustainability. We should replace it with an economy of sole proprietors, partnerships, cooperatives, not-for-profits, and for-benefits — all the wealth to all the workers — massively diverse, all competing and cooperating and innovating within a body of economic law that enforces ecological sustainability (as defined by biology) and economic fairness (as defined by real democracy.) If we don’t, we’re mathematically doomed. Charting our trajectory to zero When will billionaires stop amassing more wealth? The answer is clear: They won’t. Our total global wealth is currently $431 trillion. In the past twenty years, billionaires have grown their wealth by 13.5X, to $13.1 trillion, far outpacing the poor and total growth in global wealth. At their current pace, billionaires will control $176 trillion in twenty years and $2.3 quadrillion in forty. You read that right: If we do not stop them, billionaires will control the entire globe’s resources within our lifetime. From there, it’s simply a game of thrones to determine which few families will survive. In the winner-take-all economy, elites will not stop until they are stopped. Why can’t voter-shoppers fathom this fact? The solution is frightfully simple It’s a radical idea that will be common sense to future generations: Individual private wealth must be limited. That’s right: No more billionaires. Every dollar over $1 billion in net worth will be taxed at 100% or placed in a commons trust. As one Redditor put it: Once you reach $999,999,999 we give you a plaque that says, “congratulations, you won capitalism,” and we name a dog park after you. A global Billionaire Ban will have wonderful implications for protecting democracy and making the economy more robust and fair. Obviously, democracy can argue over the exact number for our new global limit — 10 million, 100 million, even 1 billion — so long as we agree on the underlying fundamental that private wealth must have an upper limit. Older right-leaning white men will now scream “Communism! Socialism!” while failing to realize this piece is not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on. We need to reform our economic system. We need a more equitable pre-distribution of ownership, wealth, and opportunity, and we desperately need democratic limits to protect against monopoly and wealth hoarding. This isn’t optional for the survival of our species: it’s now required for the survival of all species. The Christian response to wealth inequality What’s incredibly disturbing about the wealth inequality discussion is how callous many Christians have become to the plight of the poor. As if the riches of the wealthy matter more to our God than the survival of the poor! Luke 3:11 is perhaps the most economically-convicting verse in Scripture: “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” Clearly, God is not in favor of infinite wealth accumulation. Regardless of what reasonable limitations secularist governments place on private wealth, surely God always calls His family to a higher standard of generosity and stewardship. Mark 14:7 says that

    16 min

  8. 10/06/2021

    This Real Estate Bubble Won't Pop

    Hello friends, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance, available for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Jared A. Brock, and today we’re going to discuss why the average house will cost $10 million within 50 years. But first, a personal update: I have a son! His name is Concord Thoreau Brock. Concord means “peace,” and Thoreau means “strength.” Concord is our favorite revolutionary town in America — home to the Alcotts (of Little Women fame), Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Hawthornes, and Henry David Thoreau, the father of environmentalism and philosopher whose pacifist writings inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.  If you’d like to contribute to his education fund, head over to JaredBrock.com. Michelle was in labor for a brutal 38 hours, 11 of which were spent at a pub. (It’s a long and extremely British story.) She saw 28 medical personnel over 5 wards and 3 shift changes, and I recorded over four hundred 60+ second contractions. In the end, we had one 8.0 pound baby boy, the first male of eleven grandbabies in the family, and the first boy born to our church in twelve years! We are now accepting offers for a pre-arranged marriage. I’m feeling extremely grateful to God for this gorgeous little gift, and absolutely astounded by the physical strength and spiritual fortitude of Michelle to endure the whole glorious ordeal. But I’m greatly troubled by the world Concord will grow up in. If we keep in our insane trajectory… * He’ll have to compete with robots for work. * He’ll have to navigate totalitarian social credit systems and surveillance panopticoins. * He’ll face resource shortages, extreme weather events, species collapses, and massive societal strains caused by climate change refugees. * He’ll witness the complete privatization of public services in the hands of the corporatocracy, and the cessation of the charade of democracy as the world descends into corporate oligarchy. All of this will have serious implications for his faith and freedom. Of course, his Daddy and many others are doing their best to fight against all of these corruptions and injustices, but there simply aren’t enough Christians who are awake and understand the challenges that predator elites pose to human life and widespread flourishing. There simply aren’t enough Christian leaders who are willing to stand for the truth unto death and make radical contributions to the common good. In that sense, having a child amidst this corrupt corporatocracy is part of our act of resistance. It’s our declaration of hope against chance. One of Concord’s biggest challenges will be affordable shelter. House prices are currently at an all-time high, but we are not in a real estate bubble — we’re in a pricing paradigm shift. The old paradigm: A house’s price is the maximum amount that an area’s average local buyer can afford to mortgage over 25–40 years. But because wages have flatlined and purchasing parity is the same as in 1978, the only rational explanation for this current price explosion is a giant debt bubble… right? Wrong. The new paradigm: A house’s value is now the maximum amount of annual rental income that can be extracted from it by a global investor, multiplied by maximal institutional leverage. It’s the biggest paradigm shift in the history of human shelter, and it’s the reason why the vast majority will never own a house in the future. Because our family homes are just future hedge fund investments. In 50 years, the average house will cost $10+ million. Most people think that’s impossible, but I’ll show you the exact math on how it’s going to play out. Sure, there might be more real estate price crashes, but they’ll just be bigger versions of 2008 — buying opportunities for the hyper-elites. Even with temporary price drops, expect overall prices to continue hard up-and-to-the-right for nine major reasons. 1. Population is growing Our global family currently contains almost 7.9 billion, headed to 10.5 billion within fifty years. That’s a 33% increase in the number of people who need to be housed. While this doesn’t mean house prices will automatically increase by 33%, population growth does create more demand, which will certainly increase prices significantly. 2. People are moving to cities The overall population will “only” rise by 33%, but look at the stats on where everyone is moving: Cities. 4 billion people currently live in urban areas, but that number is set to jump to 7 billion within 30 years and will hit 8 billion in fifty. So essentially housing demand where most people live will double. What will the average house cost when twice as many people are bidding on it? 3. More people are living alone My grandma was raised in a farmhouse with a mom, dad, and a half-dozen siblings. My father-in-law was one of nine kids. Today, both of those homes probably contain less than four people. In major urban centers like New York, it’s less than 2.4 people per unit and falling. As more people live alone, we’ll need far more housing units. When there’s more demand without adequate supply, prices increase. 4. Multiple house ownership Looking at you, small-time landlords and non-resident Airbnb hosts. More than 23 million American landlords own more than one house. That might seem like a lot, but what it actually means is that 115 million Americans don’t get to own a home because a wealth-extractor owns two. “Airbnb-type models altered the market irreversibly by proving on a large scale that short term rentals were more lucrative than stable long-term residents.” — Valerie Kittell 5. Housing construction isn’t keeping up Not even close. The US housing supply has been underbuilt for over a decade, and we’re building just six houses for every ten new households. Now add the fact that… 6. Building costs are soaring amidst material shortages Lumber, paint, concrete, glass, labor, land… all rising faster than average wages. We live on a finite planet with limited resources, and those resources are becoming more expensive to extract. Accordingly, constructing new houses will continue to cost more and more. 7. Real inflation is soaring It’s almost certainly 10+% per year. And real estate always tracks with inflation. These days, in fact, shelter prices are outpacing inflation; in Canada, real estate prices are up 40% since last year. Asset inflation in America is over 30% this year across the stock market and real estate market. Even without any of the other price-rise factors on this list, if rampant real estate inflation averages 7.5% for the next fifty years, inflation alone will send the average house price over $10 million. 8. The monopolists are here When you allow speculation and investment in residential real estate, you end up where every other capitalist sector ends up — with a handful of monopolists owning all the assets in the industry. If you study history, you see this happen with steel (Carnegie), railroads (Vanderbilt), oil (Rockefeller), banking (JP Morgan), online retail (Jeff Bezos), luxury goods (Bernard Arnault), web search (Google+Youtube’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin), and so on. Monopolists will not stop until they are stopped. Obviously, up until this point in history, real estate has been a far harder market to corner because of the high upfront investment costs, but that’s changed since the invention of… 9. Outrageous leverage “A privileged class of investors are allowed to utilize the Fed and private banking system to print nearly infinite quantities of money via leverage, and use that money to out-bid first-time homebuyers who had to work for years to earn their money.” — Throop Von This is where things get truly ugly. Once monopolies form, they utilize the power of financialization to drop an economic atomic bomb on their competition. Let’s say a condo is for sale right now. * A first-time buyer can afford maybe $1,200/month, so they’re able to bid up to $250,000. * A landlord can squeeze $1,250/month in rent from a long-term tenant. If they’re expecting half their revenue to go to costs and want a 2.5% ROI plus appreciation, they’re willing to pay up to $300,000. * A non-resident Airbnb host can fetch $2,500/month in nightly rent, double the long-term landlord. So they’re willing to pay up to $600,000. * A predacious hedge fund, like all monopolies, will shave those profit margins to near-nil to destroy competition. (Amazon’s profit margin was negative for seven years while they killed off competitors.) So the hedge fund is willing to pay up to $1,200,000 to turn your house into a vacation property, nearly five times what the average person can afford. * But here’s the really insidious move: The monopoly will partner with banks that — thanks to a corporate-controlled government that constantly prints ultra-cheap money and lets them create credit out of thin air — allow them to leverage their positions to an absurd degree. The monopoly won’t be paying $1.2 million for that house — they’ll be betting Lehman Brothers was leveraged a whopping 31X.) A financialized hedge fund will be willing to pay many more multiples than you can ever possibly hope to afford. * It gets worse. Just like the banks spun off millions of mortgages as CDOs during the 2008 subprime debt crisis, the new real estate monopolists will likely take thousands of their underperforming vacation units, bundle them into shiny-looking investment packages, and get their brokers to sell them to the derivatives markets for even more leverage. Before we know it, house prices could soar to astronomical heights. An unbelievable amount of institutions are getting in on the landlording con. Banks are all announcing targets. 50,000 h

    22 min
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A podcast, newsletter, and publication for followers of The Way (and friendly haters) about how to live faithfully in the age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. jaredbrock.substack.com

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