I’m not an economist, but the hysteria over the financial crisis and debt strikes me as misplaced. Sure, New York has put us in a pickle, but the way everyone is going on about this it’s as though the rest of the country doesn’t exist.

I recently took a trip through northern Washington state, and the vast, productive land inspired awe. As I drove toward highway 20 to cross the Cascades, logging trucks rumbled by loaded with timber on a regular basis. Further along, there was a large hydroelectric plant that supplies the majority of our electricity in Seattle. On the other side of the mountains, in the idyllic Methow Valley, there were fields of hay and alfalfa. Down along the Columbia, orchards with ripening fruit followed the river. Everything was well-run, clean and productive, and there was potential for plenty more.

Here at home on the west side of the state airplanes are being assembled, fishermen’s terminal is full of boats, and ships steam into port like clockwork. This is a land of plenty — not some backward banana republic, as some are saying.

The problem is that all this natural wealth and human capital has taken a back seat to “finance,” which seems to be mainly about making money out of thin air. The gang in New York is responsible for pumping up the value of anything convenient to prop up this phony system, and apparently has no real understanding of where wealth actually comes from.

From my perspective, outside of New York, it seems as though we’d be fine without these people. Perhaps there will be some pain as we readjust, but the United States has plenty of potential, and I can only see a benefit to discrediting and cutting loose the speculative crooks who have dug us into this mess. They’ve had their boot on our collective neck for years, and even now as they are called to account by the rest of the world they scream that we need them.

It’s really no wonder that Manhattan has become the center of everything weird, parasitic and freakish in our culture. Sex in the City and these pirates go hand in hand — the suspension of reality and defiance of nature have gone so far that the New Yorker who called New York women a new species (although I wouldn’t say “higher” as he does) may have been correct. Well, they may have “evolved” themselves right into another dimension, but in all likelihood they simply deluded themselves into believing they’ve crossed the threshold into godhood.

Make believe systems have a way of propping each other up. Removing the creation of wealth from productivity frees people to come up with all sorts of other stupid ideas. For example, the idea that men and women are essentially the same, that homosexual lovers typically form stable nuclear families, and that single mothers are somehow “empowering” themselves and their children. When the money just drops from the sky like manna from heaven, perhaps a healthy society does look like something you’d see on the Lower East Side’s streets at night.

This is why we shouldn’t be all that worried about the financial crisis. It’s all based on a fantasy, and the foreigners throwing tantrums over it are simply angry that the little scheme isn’t going to be enriching them any longer. How did ordinary Americans really benefit from the enormous amount of wealth we’ve transferred to China, anyway? Of course the Chinese, Europeans, Russians and all the rest were benefiting from the great sellout of the American people.

Well, the party’s over, folks — we aren’t going to pay for it any longer. As for the idea that we’ll all be working overtime the rest of our lives to pay that phony money back to Chinese bankers, I’m afraid the Chinese are going to be disappointed, because so many potentially productive Americans have already divested from the dollar — how can we pay what we don’t have?

It’s about time this all came to an end, and I think we ought to be relieved that the end is finally here. Things will be better on the other side of this, and the wasteful excesses – both cultural and financial – will be greatly curtailed. Might be rough for a while, but hey, to a lot of us men here that’s nothing new. We can deal.