Both of these factors provide opportunities for stimulative capital expenditures to make the USA more self sufficient and sustainable but for the mind-set that led to the disaster. Of course it is necessary for that mind-set and those presumptions, especially about economics, to change in order for new productive capacity to be profitable. We would have to start pricing in the cost "externalities" such as of regulatory arbitrage and social safety-net arbitrage, and we would have to limit the scope of finance. We simply have to think the unthinkable.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."