Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why.

I hate hipsters, with their vegan diets and tiny feet and whiskery faces and sawdust bedding.  Oh, I meant hamsters.  I hate hamsters. (meme as-found)

We are becoming poor.

Not “poor” in the sense of some third-world hellhole where the average guy eats dirt and dreams of a bicycle.  No, we’re sliding into a softer, slower, more insidious kind of poor, the kind where everything costs more, does less, and shrinks while the price tag stays the same.  Think of your new Giant Size™ Freetos© Corn and Sawdust Chips®.  Thirty-three percent less product than the old Stupendous Size©, same price, and now with extra cardboard flavor for that authentic “we’re all getting cancer” mouthfeel.

Or the Chimkin King® MacNugget© that used to be a glorious 0.75 ounces of protein-packed joy (roughly three picofarads of satisfaction) and is now a sad 0.4 ounces (two millibecquerels of regret).

Same price.

Or twice the price.

You pick.  This isn’t random.  It’s the visible symptom of a deeper rot.

I think Superman® will die when he finds his crypt tonight.

To understand why we’re getting poorer, let’s ask the question:  What makes places and peoples wealthy in the first place?  Wealth isn’t some mystical fog that drifts in on the winds of good intentions.  Wealth is built, deliberately, from a handful of non-negotiable ingredients.  Screw them up, and poverty is the only destination.  Nail them, and creation of wealth is damn near impossible to stop:  look at Singapore, a rock with zero natural resources that became richer than most continents because they got the recipe right.

Here’s the list.  It’s not complicated.

Raw materials.  You need stuff to make stuff.   A country doesn’t have to own the mines or the oil fields.  Taiwan proves that.  They import what they need and turn it into iPhones© and Nvidia© chips that the world lines up to buy.  Venezuela sits on more oil than a Saudi prince’s dream and still can’t afford luxuries like toilet paper or rice.

Energy.  This is the raw material people pretend doesn’t exist until the lights flicker.  Cheap, reliable energy is the multiplier for everything else.  Coal, oil, nuclear, geothermal, solar:  swap the source if you want, but you cannot negotiate with 12 shots of vodka or thermodynamics.  I may run on booze and condiments, but without abundant energy, factories sit idle, and data centers don’t compute.  When energy gets expensive, everything else gets more expensive.  Period.

Gasoline prices are so high that I heard the homeless in Southern California have stopped huffing it and switched to cocaine to save money. (snip as-found)

Capital investment.  You have to build things to build things.  Our entire world is a stack of prior investments stretching back to the pyramids, the steam engine, the transistor. AI doesn’t pop out Sam Altman’s ass:  it needs concrete, steel, copper, water pipes, motors, and enough electricity to power a small country.  Each of those required factories, that also required factories.  Every layer of capital makes the next layer possible.  Starve that pipeline for decades and watch the future evaporate.

Drive and ingenuity.  Someone has to have the spark.  Steve Jobs said it best:  the desire to “kick a dent in the Universe.”  Wanting it isn’t enough, someone has to be smart enough and stubborn enough to actually take the risk.  That’s the rarest ingredient.  Most people are content with Nyquil P.M.™ Netflix® and Nacho Cheese Doritos©.  The ones who aren’t?  They move mountains.

Labor and physical craftsmanship.  Ideas and Jeffery Dahmer are worthless without execution.  You need trained, experienced men who can turn blueprints into reality:  welders, machinists, engineers, coders who’ve solved hard problems before and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.  Craftsmanship isn’t taught in a three-hour DEI seminar.  It’s earned through sweat, failure, and repetition.

My former wife didn’t understand algebra, which is why the x is no longer in the equation.

Right environment.  Enough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party.  Singapore, South Korea, even old-school America had governments that mostly stayed out of the way while protecting property rights and contracts.  Too little law and warlords loot your factory.  Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you.

Scoring system.  This is the secret sauce.  No scoring system at all?  Communism where everyone starves equally except the leaders.  All scoring system, no guardrails?  Wall Street cocaine binges off of hooker’s butts after their derivative play wrecked Poland.  Reward the leeches useless migrants unworthy rapists?  Hello, modern Europe, where the productive pay for the idle and call it “compassion.”  The right system rewards the creators, punishes the parasites, and lets the market sort the rest.  Mess with the incentives?  You get what you reward.

Get these seven things lined up and wealth explodes.  Miss even a couple and you’re Venezuela with better Wi-Fi.

So why are we sliding backward?

We’ve been neglecting every single one of them for decades, and the bill is coming due.

Raw materials?  We’ve got plenty underground, but we’ve regulated mining into a paperwork hellscape while China laughs and digs.  Or else.

OnlyFans© was outlawed in Orwell’s book 1984.  They wouldn’t allow thotcrime.

Energy?  We’re shutting down reliable coal and nuclear plants for windmills that work when the wind feels like it and solar that dies at sunset.  The result?  Higher costs for everything, from grocery bills to California electric cars that can’t charge because the grid is wheezing.

Capital investment?  We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone.  Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind?  That’s building Chang’s future now.

Drive and ingenuity?  Our schools turned into indoctrination camps.  Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy.  The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.”  Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

Labor and craftsmanship?  We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees.  The skilled trades?  Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades.  Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget.  Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

But we both liked heavy metal, so we eloped to Vegas for our welding.

Right environment?  We’ve got more government than ever regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book (for the younger generation, a phone book was when someone printed off a section of the Internet), agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy.  Pol Pot was too extreme, sure, but the slow-motion version where every productive act requires ten permits and a diversity audit?  That’s nearly as destructive.

Scoring system?  We reward voting for more handouts, not creating value.  Welfare cliffs, affirmative action, corporate bailouts, student loan “forgiveness” that’s really just sticking the bill on the productive.  Europe’s model of taxing the hell out of workers to fund the idle has crossed the Atlantic.  And don’t get me started about how we’re letting the people who print the money keep it.  The leeches are thriving.  The creators are exhausted.

Every one of these screw-ups shows up in the data:  houses that cost ten times what they should because we imported 100,000,000 net new consumers (legal and otherwise).  National debt? Every printed dollar dilutes the value of the ones you earned.  Shrinking products, rising prices, declining quality are all the same signal.

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

If we keep this up, we won’t be the world’s superpower.  We’ll be Albania on the Atlantic, the Mumbai in the Midwest, or the Pretoria of the Pacific Rim:  a place where the lights flicker, the shelves are half-empty, people burn Styrofoam® for heat and the ambitious either leave or give up.

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

Stop importing net consumers.  Secure the border, enforce the laws we already have and repatriate them all.

Unleash energy.  Drill, build nuclear, keep the coal plants running until the next better thing is actually ready since cheap energy fixes almost everything downstream.

Cut the regulations that strangle capital investment.  Let factories come home and encourage them to do so with tariffs.  Reward builders, not bureaucrats.

Rebuild education around merit, rigor, and actual skills.  Fire the ideologues.  Bring back shop class and calculus.

Restore the scoring system:  reward production, punish predation.  End the welfare traps.  Make work pay again.

That’s it.  All the fixes.  None require magic or a revolution.  Just the political will to stop doing stupid stuff.

So why don’t we do that?

Because the people steering the ship benefit from the decline:  a system is what it does.  Politicians get votes from the dependent class.  Bureaucrats get power from the red tape.  Corporations get cheap labor and cheap virtue-signaling.  The media gets endless stories about “systemic” problems that justify more of the same poison.

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

The ingredients for wealth haven’t vanished; we’ve just stopped mixing the batter.  But the window is closing.  Every year of delay makes the turnaround harder and everyone poorer.

I wear shoes with Velcro® closers now.  I mean, why knot?

It will be painful, more painful than pulling putting duct tape on a Kardashian’s back and pulling it off.  For the Kardashian, I mean, since I would pay money to see someone pull duct tape off of a hairy Kardashian.

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.