If You Want a Future, You Have to Pay For It

Everyone wants a future. Very few people want to pay for one. Not necessarily in money, but in patience, cooperation, public investment, long-term thinking, and the humility to build something you may never personally see completed. We talk about “the world we want” like it’s an aesthetic, as though vision alone can conjure material outcomes. But futures aren’t imagined into existence. They’re funded. Even hope has an invoice.

Austerity Is Not Neutral—It’s Surrender

When politicians say, “We can’t afford that,” what they mean is, “We are choosing not to build a world where that is possible.” Austerity performs scarcity, pretending we’ve run out of resources, when what’s actually gone missing is political will. We are not out of food, housing materials, medical knowledge, renewable energy, or willing hands. We are only out of permission to treat collective flourishing as legitimate. Austerity isn’t prudence; it’s abandonment—the slow strangling of tomorrow to preserve yesterday’s balance sheets.^{austerityThe first thing austerity cuts is imagination.}

The Future Is Built Like Infrastructure

Futures aren’t born. They’re constructed—scaffolded, patched, maintained, expanded through shared labor and patient, unglamorous work. You want high-speed rail, public healthcare, libraries that stay open, or a planet that doesn’t murder us in our sleep? That requires tax revenue, organized labor, training programs, manufacturing capacity, and steady reinvestment.

There is no dignified future where no one has to pay for collective projects. A world that demands comfort without contribution isn’t a society. It’s a mall.

We’re Afraid to Spend Because We’re Afraid to Believe We Deserve Better

This is the rot at the root. People raised inside scarcity—emotional, financial, or moral—learn to mistake deprivation for discipline. They see abundance as delusion. But scarcity is not natural; it is the product of organized withholding. The belief that cooperation is naive or generosity is wasteful is the most successful propaganda capitalism ever wrote. To rebuild faith in shared investment, we have to unlearn the idea that suffering proves worthiness.

Investment Is a Faith Statement

Investment is not blind optimism. It is belief made material. Not belief in the state as it stands, but belief in our collective capacity to learn, rebuild, and repair. It says: we are not finished yet.^{noteInvestment is a wager on continuity, a refusal to collapse possibility into the present moment.}

Faith, here, is not religious. It is infrastructural. To fund the future is to declare that the story continues—that the arc of our effort bends past our own lifespan. That is what every bridge, clinic, and public school actually is: a confession that we expect to still be here.

The Future Is Underfunded

The world we want isn’t impossible; it’s simply unbudgeted. Once you understand that, the question shifts from “Can we afford it?” to “Do we choose to build it?”

Because the truth is simple: the future already exists. It’s waiting in our decisions, our budgets, and our willingness to invest in each other. What remains is the moral choice—what kind of future, for whom, and how long we plan to keep pretending it’s someone else’s job to pay for it.

The future is infrastructure. And you are one of its architects.