It is starting already:

The Central States Pension Fund has no new plan to avoid insolvency, fund director Thomas Nyhan said this week. Without government funding, the fund will run out of money in 10 years, he said. At that time, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to “virtually nothing,” he told workers and retirees in a letter sent Friday. In a last-ditch effort, the Central States Pension Plan sought government approval to partially reduce the pensions of 115,000 retirees and the future benefits for 155,000 current workers. The proposed cuts were steep, as much as 60% for some, but it wasn’t enough. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department rejected the plan because it found that it would not actually head off insolvency.

There is no way to imagine what the resource level of the Apocalypse will look like.

Back in the 80’s, we should have endured a prolonged period of shortage and misery, extending out from Carter’s years well into Reagan’s. That period of misery would have reset the balance. It would have hardened amygdalae. It would have beaten into people an irritation with the idea of welfare, government waste, and entitlement. It would have imbued the very concept of resources with value, to each individual. Once that was done, government would have run more efficiently, and that would have pushed off any threat to economic stability.

Instead, we didn’t get that. Reagan tapped the debt spigot. Resources began to flow freely, and it changed the very way we viewed them. Suddenly, everybody had a right to a house, and college, and birth control, and diapers, and health insurance, and food, and cell phones, and anything else they could think of. Foreigners deserve citizenship, and free money, and they should even be allowed to send that money to their home country, so their families can have free money there. Nothing is worth anything, and money grows on trees. There was literally no way to communicate to the public that such profligacy would lead to a total collapse of the economic system which provided those resources, and even if there were, you probably couldn’t make people care enough to do something. Their amygdalae had grown too weak.

It is impossible for us to imagine a world where people who worked their whole lives, and contributed to a pension fund, could just have all their contributions wasted away, and end up in their golden years with nothing – unable to even afford housing or food.

That day is already here, and we have not even begun the official Apocalypse. When the real Apocalypse begins, so will the misery, and it will be unlike anything we can presently imagine – and government will be helpless to stop it.

The one positive is, it will mark the end of liberalism, at least for this turn of the cycle.