Movement is Standing Still, Standing Still is Retreating.

Machiavelli observed that states begin to die when they cease to grow. Over at Ace of Spaces, Monty applies this rule generally, as evolutionary biology does:

Every organism must evolve to keep pace with other organisms in their ecosystem to maintain their evolutionary fitness. In other words, you have to run very fast just to maintain you evolutionary position. Losing your evolutionary "fitness" means losing out to (or becoming lunch for) fitter organisms.

This is known as the Red Queen in ev-bio, the Thing that is to be Feared, the Thing that Keeps You Running. Our problem now is that we fend off the Red Queen not with our own efforts, but with the future labor:

In an honest society, debt is sometimes a prudent thing: debt allows for investment that builds even greater wealth. This kind of debt is an investment that society makes in the producers. (This is a contest of skill more than chance; so gambling is the wrong term.) Sometimes the investment fails, but more often it pays off splendidly. The system ends up with far more energy than it began with, and that's the name of the game. The Red Queen is defeated (if only for awhile).
But the debt our government is accruing is not that kind of debt. This is a drunkards' debt, the debt incurred by a spendthrift and wastrel.

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