The article mentions Victorian values- one of which was thrift, and they would have held in abhorrence modern practices such as putting debts not yet paid to you in the profit column, borrowing obscene amounts of money relative to what you make, and considering a home as merely a financial asset. They also understood rightly that the government had no business screwing around with economics.....
Excellent thoughts - the Beltway crowd truly believed that they couldn’t kill the golden goose. I think the poor thing is on life support.
A system utterly dependent on mass consumption, which is pretty much what we’ve had in the USA since 1946 (and in Europe since the end of WWII reconstruction, say, 1955 or so) has to mass consume—even by way of debt if that’s the last resort.
On the other hand, the reciprocal approach—producerism—doesn’t really work without a mass market to consume the objects of production.