This is totally obvious and yet also completely obscured. Just freeze time for a minute. Think of everything that exists in the world, or to make it simple let’s just say everything that exists in this country. By everything i mean all of the assets, all the tools, all the machines, all the knowledge, all the information and education and skills, everything that makes up the economy except the contracts. In short, the wealth, think of all the qwealth which means all of the fields, the tractors, the seeds, the forests, the factories, the skills that people have and so on including the negative things like the pollution, the soil depletion. I never before tried to divide things according to this line and so I am at a loss ofr the right word. If there is a common word for the distinction I am trying to draw, then I don’t know it. Perhaps it will work well to come at the problem from another angle. The point I am trying to make is that we are wealthy. We have a lot of stuff, an awful lot of knowledge and skills, an awful, awful lot more than we did 100 years ago, more even than 20 years ago although an awful lot of skills have been lost. Anyway, just freeze time and think of all that stuff. Then let the clock run again and remember the national debt, the homeless and hungry, those without healthcare. Flash back and forth between that freeze frame of all the stuff and the run time image of the country as it is with all its problems, and realize that the problems are the result of the contracts, for lack of a better word. We have plenty of stuff and plenty of ability. What doesn’t work are the arrangements we have made between ourselves for how those assets are distributed, held, transferred and maintained.