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US doesn't just get political influence. It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means. China for exa

by mrtksn 1y ago

US doesn't just get political influence. It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means. China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers. US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes. It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here. The situation is more like selling your startup at young age and live a lavish lifestyle with the money without working and studying and risk becoming penniless and unemployable by the 50s.

actionfromafar 1y ago
Even more sad that the US chose NOT to invest this surplus, for instance in infrastructure, education and a sensible health system.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  The surplus came with alot of responsibilities, like policing the world. And that had a hefty price tag... nearly $1 trillion annually. Wasn't much left over for public transit and free foot massages. I can entertain arguments that it was a bad bargain.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    IMHO that's a false dichotomy. The US has the worlds most inefficient health system, which is an incredibly large budget post, most of the money going to middlemen. Besides, it has also benefited from open shipping lanes as much as the rest of the world, if not more.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    "Policing the world" doesn't have to cost that much. Nearly $2tn spent just on the pointless Iraq misadventure. How much public transit and education could that have funded?
    - dgfitz 1y ago
      > How much public transit and education could that have funded? Given the current costs for NYC to expand its subway, about 500 miles of track given the current costs per mile.
      - actionfromafar 1y ago
        That sounds great actually.
      - triceratops 1y ago
        The entire NYC subway, the busiest system in the country, has 660 miles of track. NYC has a GDP of $1.3tn and the subway system has a big hand in making that possible. So that's actually a pretty good RoI. It'll go a lot further (haha!) in a less expensive city. But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
    - rangestransform 1y ago
      Policing the world is a jobs program for all of the unionized factory workers at lockmart and Boeing that would otherwise be, at best, trades workers earning a more modest wage. We can thank the MIC’s placement of factories in strategic congressional districts for that
  - wpm 1y ago
    There is plenty to pay for public transit, education, and healthcare. There always has been, locked away in stock market value owned by precious few people. On healthcare, we already pay way more than any other developed nation for far worse outcomes, we're literally WASTING money on it to make some shitheel health insurance CEOs a little richer. FOH with this woe is us bullshit, boo hoo it's so hard to police the world (something we also overpay for). We could have been taking care of each other the entire time, there is nothing stopping us but lies and attitudes like yours the lies beget.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      >health insurance CEOs a little richer. To be honest, I don't even think it's just the people at the top profiting. The whole system is like designed to create as many useless jobs as possible. If I want to get a blood test, I have to do like 4-5 referrals before I can just get my test done. If I want a diagnosis, I have to wait a week to talk with a doctor who is going to push sponsored medication anyways. I'm better off doing the research myself and buying drugs through telehealth service or the greymarket. You would be better off just having a free market where consumers figure out what doctors/nurses/pharmaceuticals are safe on their own, and you strip intellectual property protections and legal requirements for prescription drugs. It shouldn't cost a million dollars to get an x-ray. It does because there are high legal barriers that allow rent-seekers to creep in.
  - atoav 1y ago
    Yeah, only that if you spend more per capita on health care than comparable national, not less. So the argument of "We can't do $A like other countries do, because of $B" doesn't really fly if you spend more to get a worse outcome. The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
  - fatbird 1y ago
    That $1T isn't an expense. Part of it is operational, meaning keepiong boats and bases running around the world, which earns the US yet more influence and soft power and unearned media. Much of it is acquisition costs, meaning $ going into a US defense tech for research and procurement of the most advanced hardware and maintenance of those industrial bases to do so; that hardware then gets sold to allies, among other things. Saudi Arabie just purchased $142 billion of US hardware. Playing "world cop" is a net win for America, not a cost it bears.
    - s1artibartfast 1y ago
      Just because there is a soft power upside does not mean that it is a net positive. I often see this stated without any form of quantification. It is essentially a matter of faith.
      - beeflet 1y ago
        The net upside is maintaining the market that allows for a trade deficit in the first place. The problem is really that the two aren't directly linked. If you operate at a trade deficit, you don't need to manufacture at home. But if you can't manufacture at home, you can't build war machines efficiently, so you can't be the world police and ensure the market needed to operate at a trade deficit. By defunding the military you're pulling the rug out from under yourself in this sense. I would still agree that it's massively inefficient and needs to be fixed, but the working US-World system would still invest a lot of funding into the military.
        NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        Unfortunately, at some point the people who are trading products for dollar bills will catch on that there's nothing that they can buy with the dollar bills that are worth the value of the products they sent across the ocean. When that happens, people will stop accepting the dollar bills as payment... but by that point, you've hollowed out your manufacturing to such a degree that you can't ever start it back up. So you can't trade for those products (no products of your own to trade), you can't purchase them (your own currency is worthless), You can't purchase them with other nations' currencies (nothing to sell for that), and you can't make the products yourself. But "soft power". We traded long term prosperity for the short term ability to meddle in other people's countries and lives.
- rcpt 1y ago
  Car infrastructure and sprawl is hugely expensive and we spend tons on it
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    Even alon levy disagrees that maintaining suburban infrastructure is a huge driver of spending https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...
    - rcpt 1y ago
      "Even alon levy" is worded to sound like "all the experts" but if you read the article it's clear that he's taking a minority opinion. And that's because he's wrong. The US spends huge amounts on car infrastructure. At every level of government numbers are just gigantic.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The US spends $1T on education. It is extremely difficult to justify spending more when the US already spends far more per student than other developed countries. Same with infrastructure and healthcare. Without accountability for where that money went it would be foolish to throw even more money at it. Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.
  - Vicarium 1y ago
    Its never competency and focus. Individual influence averages out, its the system that creates the result at scale. To some extent higher per-student fees are expected in certain areas, most countries with heavily funded education aren't facing the same issues of rural population density. There's a lot of overhead costs to run so many schools. Then state policies and regulatory capture is the other side of course, all schools need X teaching aid from Y company for some obscene markup...
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      The system can’t do anything if academics and discipline aren’t instilled at home.
      - kiitos 1y ago
        The 1800s called and they want their moral standards back.
    - nradov 1y ago
      Rural population density isn't a real problem for education. Some rural school districts have to run longer bus routes to service their students but those aren't particularly expensive.
  - 1y ago
- mousethatroared 1y ago
  The US spends, per capita, more public funds on education and health care than any other industrialized nation in the world. Some of the worse performing schools in the US have the most per capita funding.
- ty6853 1y ago
  Because the population has been tricked way too many times with the "we're allocating these taxes to education" dogwhistle. When every fucking time they open a lottery or have a new tax, and promise it will go to the schools, but they defund what's coming out of the general fund to the schools by that exact amount, you can only cry wolf so many times before that doesn't work anymore. To get this to work anymore you're going to have to create a constitutional amendment or something that the school gets X and there will be no fuck fuck games that they aren't just defunding the schools some other place so they can use it on the next corrupt "construction" project.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  The U.S. can absolutely fund Scandinavian‑style social programs, it just chooses not to, in part because the reserve‑currency framework makes the optics of deficits uniquely skewed. This is one of the consequences of the US's self-inflicted burden of the Triffin Dilemma.
- hunglee2 1y ago
  sad that you're being downvoted here, very clear that the US investment into society is low in relative terms. In fact, doing so in considered 'socialism' and widely condemned by almost all the political establishment.
alephnerd 1y ago
> China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers That's more a function of subsidizes instead of foreign preference for USD. Chinese median household incomes (Yuan 34,000 or around $4,700) are much too low to spend on most goods at scale [0], and most of the money that could be spent on expanding the social safety net (and thus incentivizing Chinese consumers to spend instead of save) is spent on industrial subsidizes like tax holidays, a regressive income tax system comparable to the US, and subsidizing various redundant but provincially influential SOEs that can't compete with domestic private sector players (eg. traditional Chinese automotive players like SAIC and Chery versus BYD), and this is reflected in Chinese spending data as well as StatsChina's breakdown of spending by urban and rural Chinese [0]. You are going to be dependent on foreign exports if your domestic consumers can only spend around Yuan 4000/$550 a year on transportation and telecom combined. Even factoring for PPP, it is difficult as these metrics are low in comparison to peer countries from a developmental standpoint. A lot of the "overproduction" that has made Chinese goods globally dominant is a result of that misalignment between consumers and production. Expanding the social safety net in China would dramatically enhance Chinese competitiveness over the long term, but top level leadership remains explicitly opposed to what they call "Welfarism" [1]: "福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱" "In countries that use a welfare model, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarizing, society is torn apart, and populism is rising. This is a warning - Prevent yourself from falling into the trap of "welfarism" to support lazy people" [0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t20250124_1958443.html https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501... [1] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.html http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  China definitely has industrial policy supporting its manufacturing, but the wages argument is begging the question. The USD, as the global reserve currency, is over-valued; if an alternative system were used (eg. the Bancor) and the Yuan allowed to float, then those 34,000 Yuan would buy a lot more and the median US wage would buy less.
s1artibartfast 1y ago
>There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes. I think the risk is greater than that. A concern is not just a regression to the mean, but indebtedness and the future having to pay up for the spending of the past. I think a different analogy would be a joint credit card where someone can run up the bill and then die. Like national debt, you can always default, but it will be the survivor that takes the hit, not the dead person that spent their life in luxury. The trade deficit isn't necessarily a problem, but national debt is. It would be one thing if this money was being invested in growth, but it largely isn't. Most of it funds non-growth consumption. This is largely a self-made internal problem around governmental prioritization and balancing revenue with expenditure. That isn't to say other countries don't also benefit. The US is trading future prosperity for consumption today. Investing countries are trading consumption today for future prosperity.
- foobarian 1y ago
  These all seem like side effects of the global reserve currency status. You can't balance the budget until that is given up. Giving up that status would be very painful, so given the choice of pain now or pain later, the current situation seems reasonable to me.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    I disagree, it is a consequence of debt outpacing growth. The key characteristics of a reserve currency are stability and liquidity. If you have these, you don't even need to pay interest. With properly managed that, being the reserve currency is a win on all fronts. You get to run a deficit because people are happy to trade real products for your paper. People are also willing to loan your paper back to you at more favorable rates. The only downside is if you get drunk and outspend even the inflated demand for your currency. The smart move is to rain in deficit spending if you can't get favorable lending rates. Blowing up reserve status doesn't help this problem. Then you just have to pay higher and higher interest rates because no one wants your paper anymore
  - 1y ago
hunglee2 1y ago
Indeed true - US is 4% of the global population but 25% of the global consumption, if not more. You can see this via the eyeball test - everything is bigger: cars, houses, even the people. US invented 'overproduction' to smear Chinese manufacturing, but did not consider the other side of the coin, which is US 'overconsumption'. Two to tango etc
- EasyMark 1y ago
  I see this tossed around but no one ever seems to point out that EU has similar numbers, which are about half, but still extremely higher than global average; and much more so in the richer countries of the EU (per capita of course)
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    The EU complains about China Shock equally as much as the US [0][1][2][3][4][5][6] Just becuase Trump burnt bridges with the EU doesn't mean that EU member states will gladly allow job losses across Europe's industrial heartland to a country that is supplying a direct competitor (Russia) that has conducted grey zone warfare within the EU The EU and it's member states are all working on building domestic capacity, and pushing Chinese manufacturers to manufacture WITHIN the EU [7][8], and further diversifying by making FTAs with ASEAN [9][10], Japan [11], SK [12], India [13], etc. In essence, nothing has materially changed in European policy with regards to China compared to under the Biden administration. Chinese overproduction is a global issue now, and most major economies and blocs have enacted barriers and will continue to do so unless China removes it's barriers to imports, subsidizes, and technology transfers. [0] - https://ecfr.eu/publication/electric-shock-the-chinese-threat-to-europes-industrial-heartland/?amp https://ecfr.eu/publication/electric-shock-the-chinese-threa... [1] - https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2025/how-german-industry-can-survive-second-china-shock https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2025/ho... [2] - https://www.gmfus.org/news/watching-china-europe-may-2025 https://www.gmfus.org/news/watching-china-europe-may-2025 [3] - https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/07/eus-unsustainable-china-strategy/european-issues-china https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/07/eus-unsustainable-china... [4] - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog240903~57f1b63192.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog... [5] - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13259/hit-by-the-silk-road-how-wage-coordination-in-europe-mitigates-the-china-shock https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13259/hit-by-the-silk-ro... [6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/eu-economy-chief-urges-china-self-restraint-on-diverting-goods?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/eu-econom... [7] - https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/near-shoring-is-turning-eastern-europe-into-the-new-china https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/near-shoring-is-... [8] - https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/The%20EU%E2%80%99s%20concept%20of%20de-risking%20hovers%20around%20economic%20diversification%20rather%20than%20national%20security.pdf https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/The%20EU... [9] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/sweden-propose-eu-membership-pacific-rim-free-trade-group-cptpp-2025-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/sweden-propose-eu-member... [10] - https://www.ft.com/content/bee31826-012d-4bb1-a6eb-d6cc0d4ef39f https://www.ft.com/content/bee31826-012d-4bb1-a6eb-d6cc0d4ef... [11] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/japan/eu-japan-agreement_en https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou... [12] - https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-south-korea-free-trade-agreement https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-s... [13] - https://apnews.com/article/india-eu-modi-ursula-von-der-leyen-309ab4795ad0206b66fe20bef5ca9a92 https://apnews.com/article/india-eu-modi-ursula-von-der-leye...
rayiner 1y ago
It seems like a bit of A and a bit of B, perhaps more A than B. How do we maintain global reserve status—what is the cost? Is it one of the reasons why have military bases all over the world? Back in the day, people used to say the U.S. went to war in Iraq because Saddam was going to switch away from the petrodollar. Under your reserve-currency theory, that seems quite possible, no?
cryptonector 1y ago
Everyone gets something, or every country anyways. The export-led growth Asian miracles are really just a part of this. Maybe the Chinese worker gets screwed, but China maybe doesn't. Something like that.
- Retric 1y ago
  Chinese workers got actual work vs being automated out of the farming industry and starving. China gets to import raw resources from other countries to feed both domestic production and foreign export. It was a rational strategy that’s getting outdated as China’s economy grew enough that exports can’t ramp up any more.
starspangled 1y ago
> It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means. What does this mean really? That is their means. For a somewhat topical example, people of Australia get access to cheap medications (in part because they pay to subsidize the cost of them but also because) their government negotiates with pharmaceutical corporations to pay lower prices. This kind of negotiation would be completely out of reach of any private Australian person, but they are not living outside their means. Their means includes the means to elect governments to run the country for the benefit of its own people including doing things like securing lower prices for medications. > China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers. Until 1990, Kenya had a higher GDP per capia than China. It is absolutely not "imaginary". Work produces real value, just because you can represent or trade that for allegedly "imaginary" currency does not mean that the value created was imaginary. > US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes. US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. > It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here. Seems like that's the popular assertion but I don't see much solid reasoning behind it in this thread (not picking on you specifically), just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.
- chabska 1y ago
  > US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. Only on a dollar value basis. And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated. When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?
  - starspangled 1y ago
greenavocado 1y ago
The mental gymnastics here to justify the dollar's reserve status and trade deficits as some kind of genius economic strategy are incredible. First off, this ridiculous notion that the US "gets products and services enabling residents to live beyond their means" is classic ivory tower cope. Yeah, tell that to the average American worker whose real wages have been stagnant for DECADES while housing, healthcare, and education costs have gone full rocket ship. We're not living large - we're drowning in debt while our industrial base gets hollowed out and our cities rot. But sure, keep telling yourself those cheap plastic crap from China is some kind of economic superpower move. And this nonsense about "imaginary numbers" - spare me. Try telling the Chinese worker breaking their back in a Foxconn factory that their labor is being exchanged for "imaginary" dollars when those same dollars buy real commodities on global markets. The only thing imaginary here is your understanding of how actual wealth transfer works. The Fed's money printer goes BRRR, Wall Street gets bailouts, and the working class gets hollowed-out towns and opioid epidemics. This whole "trade deficit is fine because we export dollars" nonsense is cope. We get to print monopoly money and trade it for real goods sounds great until you realize it's turned the US into a hollowed-out consumerist wasteland. Our manufacturing base? Gutted. Middle class wages? Stagnant for decades. But hey, at least Wall Street gets to play financialization games with all those dollars floating around overseas, right? The petrodollar cope is particularly hilarious. "Oh but the USD is backed by oil and military power!" Yeah, how's that working out now that the BRICS nations are openly trading in local currencies? Saudi Arabia taking yuan for oil? Russia and China settling trade in rubles and yuan? The entire Global South is laughing at your "reserve currency" while they quietly build alternative financial systems. But sure, keep telling yourself that 1971 was some genius move rather than the beginning of the greatest wealth transfer scheme in human history. Spare me the "political influence" argument. You know what else gives you influence? Actually MAKING things. The US used to be the arsenal of democracy because we had real industrial capacity. Now we're the ATM of the world. Sure, everyone takes our dollars, but they're laughing at us behind our backs while they build actual industries. China takes our funny money, build world-class infrastructure and tech, while we get... what? A service economy of Uber drivers and baristas? The MMT shills in this thread claiming deficits don't matter are smoking crack. Yeah, it's all fun and games until the music stops. The dollar's dominance isn't some natural law. It's propped up by petrodollar recycling and military bases in 800 countries. But guess what? The BRICS are building alternatives as we speak, and when the world finds a way to ditch the dollar, the inflation tsunami will make the 70s look like a picnic. And don't even get me started on the "but manufacturing doesn't pay well" cope. Oh yeah, because working at Amazon warehouses or DoorDashing is such a step up from union factory jobs that could support a family on one income? The deindustrialization of America was the greatest wealth transfer from working people to corporate elites in history, dressed up as "free trade." The 1971 Nixon Shock was the original sin that decoupled money from reality. Since then it's been one giant debt orgy where the rich get richer by financial engineering while the country's real productive capacity withers. But sure, keep telling yourself that running perpetual trade deficits while offshoring our industrial base is "sustainable" because we have the money printer. China now owns our supply chains, controls key industries, and is busy strong arming its way to global dominance. Walmart shelves full of $2 plastic junk don’t make up for the collapse of skilled labor wages. Go tell a factory worker in Ohio that his job loss was worth it because iPhone assembly got outsourced to Foxconn. The "cheap goods" argument is cope for elites who profit from globalization while real wages stagnate for decades. The average American gets screwed by this system with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and a crumbling infrastructure while the elites jet around on private planes bought with Fed-printed junk money. The dollar's reserve status isn't a privilege. It's a curse that's let us paper over our decline with debt instead of making tough choices. Confidence in the dollar is not an infinitely sustainable glitch. When the world finally gets sick of funding our deficits, the reckoning will make 2008 look like a picnic. No fiat currency survives its own abuse. When the reckoning comes, it won't be the bankers and politicians who suffer. The reality is brutally simple. Decoupling from gold removed all discipline from the system. Politicians could spend without consequence, financiers could gamble with abandon, and the productive economy got outsourced to slave-labor nations while we became a nation of paper-pushers and baristas. Now we're staring down the barrel of $35 trillion in debt, supply chains we don't control, and a currency that's one crisis away from a Venezuela-style collapse. But yeah sure, keep telling yourself everything's fine because some Keynesian academics drew you a pretty graph. The Romans probably had similar debates while their denarius turned to trash and the barbarians gathered at the gates.
dzonga 1y ago
GDP numbers can be "imaginary" but production numbers are not. China produces more ships in a year than the US. Generates More Power from Hydro than the whole of Africa. We could dig more -- but that's just on top of my head. Just like how the US was able to help the allies win WW2 by producing more. It will lose a war against China - because of incredible chinese production
IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago
Your statement would be true without nuance. Yes. The mass of US consumers do benefit from penny subsidies of certain foreign product. However, for every penny of foreign subsidy benefitting US consumers buying finished iron or steel goods, a US metallurgist is losing a job somewhere. On strictly numbers, we are better off with foreing-paid subsidies yes, but there are losers, and they take the brunt of the downside. So id update your analogy by adding a twist: your childhood sitter living on anytown, USA was the virtual receptionist of the business. She had no RSUs in the business. She stayed in anytown and declined a career in a larger, growing city because she found virtual work and it made her happy. Now she's stuck with a mortgage, in a dying town, and with no career prospects locally. And all because you offered her a job that incentivized her to move, and then changed the relationship to her job 180 degrees . Separately, ive only discussed the trade impact on consumers. We arent going into trade impacting producers, for example matters like producers having their inventions stolen, or their investment nationalized, to name a few examples.. -
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Good point but I think these are about the choices you make. You can choose to look after your metallurgist who become obsolete as a laborers but I'm sure they are amazing people. You might be worried for becoming communist or welfare state though. You can choose to limit trade and other freedoms so you can artificially keep metallurgists at work so you don't have to share what you have with them without exchanging something. This can help you can feel good about not giving away freebies and pretend that this is a meritocracy but suffer from slow progress and other conflicts related in preserving these artificial limits. You can just choose to leave them to suffer as long as their numbers are not enough to bother you. This one gives you the good life until suddenly it stops doing that if the numbers go up enough. I guess in this case it was to ignore the "losers" in the system until they become numerous enough to tear down the whole system. A lot of people who vote for obvious frauds and outright fascists(I'm not talking about USA, but in general) are just anti-establishment who don't mean bad but just want to see the current order teared apart at any price.
  - sgc 1y ago
mediaman 1y ago
The idea that the hard goods are sold for "imaginary numbers" is popular but a bit of a misnomer. These "imaginary numbers" are actually claims on future income generated by the United States economy. It is true that they are "imaginary", in the sense that any property ownership is imaginary in a way that a toaster is not. The most common form is Treasuries, which the government then pays interest on and which must eventually be either repaid or rolled over. So it would be more correct to say that China is trading hard work building goods in exchange for claims on future US income.

by mrtksn 1y ago

actionfromafar 1y ago

Even more sad that the US chose NOT to invest this surplus, for instance in infrastructure, education and a sensible health system.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
The surplus came with alot of responsibilities, like policing the world. And that had a hefty price tag... nearly $1 trillion annually. Wasn't much left over for public transit and free foot massages. I can entertain arguments that it was a bad bargain.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  IMHO that's a false dichotomy. The US has the worlds most inefficient health system, which is an incredibly large budget post, most of the money going to middlemen. Besides, it has also benefited from open shipping lanes as much as the rest of the world, if not more.
- triceratops 1y ago
  "Policing the world" doesn't have to cost that much. Nearly $2tn spent just on the pointless Iraq misadventure. How much public transit and education could that have funded?
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    > How much public transit and education could that have funded? Given the current costs for NYC to expand its subway, about 500 miles of track given the current costs per mile.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      That sounds great actually.
    - triceratops 1y ago
      The entire NYC subway, the busiest system in the country, has 660 miles of track. NYC has a GDP of $1.3tn and the subway system has a big hand in making that possible. So that's actually a pretty good RoI. It'll go a lot further (haha!) in a less expensive city. But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    Policing the world is a jobs program for all of the unionized factory workers at lockmart and Boeing that would otherwise be, at best, trades workers earning a more modest wage. We can thank the MIC’s placement of factories in strategic congressional districts for that
- wpm 1y ago
  There is plenty to pay for public transit, education, and healthcare. There always has been, locked away in stock market value owned by precious few people. On healthcare, we already pay way more than any other developed nation for far worse outcomes, we're literally WASTING money on it to make some shitheel health insurance CEOs a little richer. FOH with this woe is us bullshit, boo hoo it's so hard to police the world (something we also overpay for). We could have been taking care of each other the entire time, there is nothing stopping us but lies and attitudes like yours the lies beget.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    >health insurance CEOs a little richer. To be honest, I don't even think it's just the people at the top profiting. The whole system is like designed to create as many useless jobs as possible. If I want to get a blood test, I have to do like 4-5 referrals before I can just get my test done. If I want a diagnosis, I have to wait a week to talk with a doctor who is going to push sponsored medication anyways. I'm better off doing the research myself and buying drugs through telehealth service or the greymarket. You would be better off just having a free market where consumers figure out what doctors/nurses/pharmaceuticals are safe on their own, and you strip intellectual property protections and legal requirements for prescription drugs. It shouldn't cost a million dollars to get an x-ray. It does because there are high legal barriers that allow rent-seekers to creep in.
- atoav 1y ago
  Yeah, only that if you spend more per capita on health care than comparable national, not less. So the argument of "We can't do $A like other countries do, because of $B" doesn't really fly if you spend more to get a worse outcome. The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
- fatbird 1y ago
  That $1T isn't an expense. Part of it is operational, meaning keepiong boats and bases running around the world, which earns the US yet more influence and soft power and unearned media. Much of it is acquisition costs, meaning $ going into a US defense tech for research and procurement of the most advanced hardware and maintenance of those industrial bases to do so; that hardware then gets sold to allies, among other things. Saudi Arabie just purchased $142 billion of US hardware. Playing "world cop" is a net win for America, not a cost it bears.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    Just because there is a soft power upside does not mean that it is a net positive. I often see this stated without any form of quantification. It is essentially a matter of faith.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      The net upside is maintaining the market that allows for a trade deficit in the first place. The problem is really that the two aren't directly linked. If you operate at a trade deficit, you don't need to manufacture at home. But if you can't manufacture at home, you can't build war machines efficiently, so you can't be the world police and ensure the market needed to operate at a trade deficit. By defunding the military you're pulling the rug out from under yourself in this sense. I would still agree that it's massively inefficient and needs to be fixed, but the working US-World system would still invest a lot of funding into the military.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        Unfortunately, at some point the people who are trading products for dollar bills will catch on that there's nothing that they can buy with the dollar bills that are worth the value of the products they sent across the ocean. When that happens, people will stop accepting the dollar bills as payment... but by that point, you've hollowed out your manufacturing to such a degree that you can't ever start it back up. So you can't trade for those products (no products of your own to trade), you can't purchase them (your own currency is worthless), You can't purchase them with other nations' currencies (nothing to sell for that), and you can't make the products yourself. But "soft power". We traded long term prosperity for the short term ability to meddle in other people's countries and lives.
rcpt 1y ago
Car infrastructure and sprawl is hugely expensive and we spend tons on it
- rangestransform 1y ago
  Even alon levy disagrees that maintaining suburban infrastructure is a huge driver of spending https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...
  - rcpt 1y ago
    "Even alon levy" is worded to sound like "all the experts" but if you read the article it's clear that he's taking a minority opinion. And that's because he's wrong. The US spends huge amounts on car infrastructure. At every level of government numbers are just gigantic.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
The US spends $1T on education. It is extremely difficult to justify spending more when the US already spends far more per student than other developed countries. Same with infrastructure and healthcare. Without accountability for where that money went it would be foolish to throw even more money at it. Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.
- Vicarium 1y ago
  Its never competency and focus. Individual influence averages out, its the system that creates the result at scale. To some extent higher per-student fees are expected in certain areas, most countries with heavily funded education aren't facing the same issues of rural population density. There's a lot of overhead costs to run so many schools. Then state policies and regulatory capture is the other side of course, all schools need X teaching aid from Y company for some obscene markup...
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    The system can’t do anything if academics and discipline aren’t instilled at home.
    - kiitos 1y ago
      The 1800s called and they want their moral standards back.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Rural population density isn't a real problem for education. Some rural school districts have to run longer bus routes to service their students but those aren't particularly expensive.
- 1y ago
mousethatroared 1y ago
The US spends, per capita, more public funds on education and health care than any other industrialized nation in the world. Some of the worse performing schools in the US have the most per capita funding.
ty6853 1y ago
Because the population has been tricked way too many times with the "we're allocating these taxes to education" dogwhistle. When every fucking time they open a lottery or have a new tax, and promise it will go to the schools, but they defund what's coming out of the general fund to the schools by that exact amount, you can only cry wolf so many times before that doesn't work anymore. To get this to work anymore you're going to have to create a constitutional amendment or something that the school gets X and there will be no fuck fuck games that they aren't just defunding the schools some other place so they can use it on the next corrupt "construction" project.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
The U.S. can absolutely fund Scandinavian‑style social programs, it just chooses not to, in part because the reserve‑currency framework makes the optics of deficits uniquely skewed. This is one of the consequences of the US's self-inflicted burden of the Triffin Dilemma.
hunglee2 1y ago
sad that you're being downvoted here, very clear that the US investment into society is low in relative terms. In fact, doing so in considered 'socialism' and widely condemned by almost all the political establishment.

alephnerd 1y ago

> China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers That's more a function of subsidizes instead of foreign preference for USD. Chinese median household incomes (Yuan 34,000 or around $4,700) are much too low to spend on most goods at scale [0], and most of the money that could be spent on expanding the social safety net (and thus incentivizing Chinese consumers to spend instead of save) is spent on industrial subsidizes like tax holidays, a regressive income tax system comparable to the US, and subsidizing various redundant but provincially influential SOEs that can't compete with domestic private sector players (eg. traditional Chinese automotive players like SAIC and Chery versus BYD), and this is reflected in Chinese spending data as well as StatsChina's breakdown of spending by urban and rural Chinese [0]. You are going to be dependent on foreign exports if your domestic consumers can only spend around Yuan 4000/$550 a year on transportation and telecom combined. Even factoring for PPP, it is difficult as these metrics are low in comparison to peer countries from a developmental standpoint. A lot of the "overproduction" that has made Chinese goods globally dominant is a result of that misalignment between consumers and production. Expanding the social safety net in China would dramatically enhance Chinese competitiveness over the long term, but top level leadership remains explicitly opposed to what they call "Welfarism" [1]: "福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱" "In countries that use a welfare model, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarizing, society is torn apart, and populism is rising. This is a warning - Prevent yourself from falling into the trap of "welfarism" to support lazy people" [0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t20250124_1958443.html https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501... [1] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.html http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...

mitthrowaway2 1y ago
China definitely has industrial policy supporting its manufacturing, but the wages argument is begging the question. The USD, as the global reserve currency, is over-valued; if an alternative system were used (eg. the Bancor) and the Yuan allowed to float, then those 34,000 Yuan would buy a lot more and the median US wage would buy less.

s1artibartfast 1y ago

>There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes. I think the risk is greater than that. A concern is not just a regression to the mean, but indebtedness and the future having to pay up for the spending of the past. I think a different analogy would be a joint credit card where someone can run up the bill and then die. Like national debt, you can always default, but it will be the survivor that takes the hit, not the dead person that spent their life in luxury. The trade deficit isn't necessarily a problem, but national debt is. It would be one thing if this money was being invested in growth, but it largely isn't. Most of it funds non-growth consumption. This is largely a self-made internal problem around governmental prioritization and balancing revenue with expenditure. That isn't to say other countries don't also benefit. The US is trading future prosperity for consumption today. Investing countries are trading consumption today for future prosperity.

foobarian 1y ago
These all seem like side effects of the global reserve currency status. You can't balance the budget until that is given up. Giving up that status would be very painful, so given the choice of pain now or pain later, the current situation seems reasonable to me.
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  I disagree, it is a consequence of debt outpacing growth. The key characteristics of a reserve currency are stability and liquidity. If you have these, you don't even need to pay interest. With properly managed that, being the reserve currency is a win on all fronts. You get to run a deficit because people are happy to trade real products for your paper. People are also willing to loan your paper back to you at more favorable rates. The only downside is if you get drunk and outspend even the inflated demand for your currency. The smart move is to rain in deficit spending if you can't get favorable lending rates. Blowing up reserve status doesn't help this problem. Then you just have to pay higher and higher interest rates because no one wants your paper anymore
- 1y ago

hunglee2 1y ago

Indeed true - US is 4% of the global population but 25% of the global consumption, if not more. You can see this via the eyeball test - everything is bigger: cars, houses, even the people. US invented 'overproduction' to smear Chinese manufacturing, but did not consider the other side of the coin, which is US 'overconsumption'. Two to tango etc

EasyMark 1y ago
I see this tossed around but no one ever seems to point out that EU has similar numbers, which are about half, but still extremely higher than global average; and much more so in the richer countries of the EU (per capita of course)
- alephnerd 1y ago
  The EU complains about China Shock equally as much as the US [0][1][2][3][4][5][6] Just becuase Trump burnt bridges with the EU doesn't mean that EU member states will gladly allow job losses across Europe's industrial heartland to a country that is supplying a direct competitor (Russia) that has conducted grey zone warfare within the EU The EU and it's member states are all working on building domestic capacity, and pushing Chinese manufacturers to manufacture WITHIN the EU [7][8], and further diversifying by making FTAs with ASEAN [9][10], Japan [11], SK [12], India [13], etc. In essence, nothing has materially changed in European policy with regards to China compared to under the Biden administration. Chinese overproduction is a global issue now, and most major economies and blocs have enacted barriers and will continue to do so unless China removes it's barriers to imports, subsidizes, and technology transfers. [0] - https://ecfr.eu/publication/electric-shock-the-chinese-threat-to-europes-industrial-heartland/?amp https://ecfr.eu/publication/electric-shock-the-chinese-threa... [1] - https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2025/how-german-industry-can-survive-second-china-shock https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2025/ho... [2] - https://www.gmfus.org/news/watching-china-europe-may-2025 https://www.gmfus.org/news/watching-china-europe-may-2025 [3] - https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/07/eus-unsustainable-china-strategy/european-issues-china https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/07/eus-unsustainable-china... [4] - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog240903~57f1b63192.en.html https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog... [5] - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13259/hit-by-the-silk-road-how-wage-coordination-in-europe-mitigates-the-china-shock https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13259/hit-by-the-silk-ro... [6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/eu-economy-chief-urges-china-self-restraint-on-diverting-goods?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/eu-econom... [7] - https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/near-shoring-is-turning-eastern-europe-into-the-new-china https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/near-shoring-is-... [8] - https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/The%20EU%E2%80%99s%20concept%20of%20de-risking%20hovers%20around%20economic%20diversification%20rather%20than%20national%20security.pdf https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/The%20EU... [9] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/sweden-propose-eu-membership-pacific-rim-free-trade-group-cptpp-2025-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/sweden-propose-eu-member... [10] - https://www.ft.com/content/bee31826-012d-4bb1-a6eb-d6cc0d4ef39f https://www.ft.com/content/bee31826-012d-4bb1-a6eb-d6cc0d4ef... [11] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/japan/eu-japan-agreement_en https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou... [12] - https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-south-korea-free-trade-agreement https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/eu-s... [13] - https://apnews.com/article/india-eu-modi-ursula-von-der-leyen-309ab4795ad0206b66fe20bef5ca9a92 https://apnews.com/article/india-eu-modi-ursula-von-der-leye...

rayiner 1y ago

It seems like a bit of A and a bit of B, perhaps more A than B. How do we maintain global reserve status—what is the cost? Is it one of the reasons why have military bases all over the world? Back in the day, people used to say the U.S. went to war in Iraq because Saddam was going to switch away from the petrodollar. Under your reserve-currency theory, that seems quite possible, no?

cryptonector 1y ago

Everyone gets something, or every country anyways. The export-led growth Asian miracles are really just a part of this. Maybe the Chinese worker gets screwed, but China maybe doesn't. Something like that.

Retric 1y ago
Chinese workers got actual work vs being automated out of the farming industry and starving. China gets to import raw resources from other countries to feed both domestic production and foreign export. It was a rational strategy that’s getting outdated as China’s economy grew enough that exports can’t ramp up any more.

starspangled 1y ago

> It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means. What does this mean really? That is their means. For a somewhat topical example, people of Australia get access to cheap medications (in part because they pay to subsidize the cost of them but also because) their government negotiates with pharmaceutical corporations to pay lower prices. This kind of negotiation would be completely out of reach of any private Australian person, but they are not living outside their means. Their means includes the means to elect governments to run the country for the benefit of its own people including doing things like securing lower prices for medications. > China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers. Until 1990, Kenya had a higher GDP per capia than China. It is absolutely not "imaginary". Work produces real value, just because you can represent or trade that for allegedly "imaginary" currency does not mean that the value created was imaginary. > US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes. US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. > It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here. Seems like that's the popular assertion but I don't see much solid reasoning behind it in this thread (not picking on you specifically), just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.

chabska 1y ago
> US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis. Only on a dollar value basis. And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated. When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?
- starspangled 1y ago

greenavocado 1y ago

The mental gymnastics here to justify the dollar's reserve status and trade deficits as some kind of genius economic strategy are incredible. First off, this ridiculous notion that the US "gets products and services enabling residents to live beyond their means" is classic ivory tower cope. Yeah, tell that to the average American worker whose real wages have been stagnant for DECADES while housing, healthcare, and education costs have gone full rocket ship. We're not living large - we're drowning in debt while our industrial base gets hollowed out and our cities rot. But sure, keep telling yourself those cheap plastic crap from China is some kind of economic superpower move. And this nonsense about "imaginary numbers" - spare me. Try telling the Chinese worker breaking their back in a Foxconn factory that their labor is being exchanged for "imaginary" dollars when those same dollars buy real commodities on global markets. The only thing imaginary here is your understanding of how actual wealth transfer works. The Fed's money printer goes BRRR, Wall Street gets bailouts, and the working class gets hollowed-out towns and opioid epidemics. This whole "trade deficit is fine because we export dollars" nonsense is cope. We get to print monopoly money and trade it for real goods sounds great until you realize it's turned the US into a hollowed-out consumerist wasteland. Our manufacturing base? Gutted. Middle class wages? Stagnant for decades. But hey, at least Wall Street gets to play financialization games with all those dollars floating around overseas, right? The petrodollar cope is particularly hilarious. "Oh but the USD is backed by oil and military power!" Yeah, how's that working out now that the BRICS nations are openly trading in local currencies? Saudi Arabia taking yuan for oil? Russia and China settling trade in rubles and yuan? The entire Global South is laughing at your "reserve currency" while they quietly build alternative financial systems. But sure, keep telling yourself that 1971 was some genius move rather than the beginning of the greatest wealth transfer scheme in human history. Spare me the "political influence" argument. You know what else gives you influence? Actually MAKING things. The US used to be the arsenal of democracy because we had real industrial capacity. Now we're the ATM of the world. Sure, everyone takes our dollars, but they're laughing at us behind our backs while they build actual industries. China takes our funny money, build world-class infrastructure and tech, while we get... what? A service economy of Uber drivers and baristas? The MMT shills in this thread claiming deficits don't matter are smoking crack. Yeah, it's all fun and games until the music stops. The dollar's dominance isn't some natural law. It's propped up by petrodollar recycling and military bases in 800 countries. But guess what? The BRICS are building alternatives as we speak, and when the world finds a way to ditch the dollar, the inflation tsunami will make the 70s look like a picnic. And don't even get me started on the "but manufacturing doesn't pay well" cope. Oh yeah, because working at Amazon warehouses or DoorDashing is such a step up from union factory jobs that could support a family on one income? The deindustrialization of America was the greatest wealth transfer from working people to corporate elites in history, dressed up as "free trade." The 1971 Nixon Shock was the original sin that decoupled money from reality. Since then it's been one giant debt orgy where the rich get richer by financial engineering while the country's real productive capacity withers. But sure, keep telling yourself that running perpetual trade deficits while offshoring our industrial base is "sustainable" because we have the money printer. China now owns our supply chains, controls key industries, and is busy strong arming its way to global dominance. Walmart shelves full of $2 plastic junk don’t make up for the collapse of skilled labor wages. Go tell a factory worker in Ohio that his job loss was worth it because iPhone assembly got outsourced to Foxconn. The "cheap goods" argument is cope for elites who profit from globalization while real wages stagnate for decades. The average American gets screwed by this system with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and a crumbling infrastructure while the elites jet around on private planes bought with Fed-printed junk money. The dollar's reserve status isn't a privilege. It's a curse that's let us paper over our decline with debt instead of making tough choices. Confidence in the dollar is not an infinitely sustainable glitch. When the world finally gets sick of funding our deficits, the reckoning will make 2008 look like a picnic. No fiat currency survives its own abuse. When the reckoning comes, it won't be the bankers and politicians who suffer. The reality is brutally simple. Decoupling from gold removed all discipline from the system. Politicians could spend without consequence, financiers could gamble with abandon, and the productive economy got outsourced to slave-labor nations while we became a nation of paper-pushers and baristas. Now we're staring down the barrel of $35 trillion in debt, supply chains we don't control, and a currency that's one crisis away from a Venezuela-style collapse. But yeah sure, keep telling yourself everything's fine because some Keynesian academics drew you a pretty graph. The Romans probably had similar debates while their denarius turned to trash and the barbarians gathered at the gates.

dzonga 1y ago

GDP numbers can be "imaginary" but production numbers are not. China produces more ships in a year than the US. Generates More Power from Hydro than the whole of Africa. We could dig more -- but that's just on top of my head. Just like how the US was able to help the allies win WW2 by producing more. It will lose a war against China - because of incredible chinese production

IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago

Your statement would be true without nuance. Yes. The mass of US consumers do benefit from penny subsidies of certain foreign product. However, for every penny of foreign subsidy benefitting US consumers buying finished iron or steel goods, a US metallurgist is losing a job somewhere. On strictly numbers, we are better off with foreing-paid subsidies yes, but there are losers, and they take the brunt of the downside. So id update your analogy by adding a twist: your childhood sitter living on anytown, USA was the virtual receptionist of the business. She had no RSUs in the business. She stayed in anytown and declined a career in a larger, growing city because she found virtual work and it made her happy. Now she's stuck with a mortgage, in a dying town, and with no career prospects locally. And all because you offered her a job that incentivized her to move, and then changed the relationship to her job 180 degrees . Separately, ive only discussed the trade impact on consumers. We arent going into trade impacting producers, for example matters like producers having their inventions stolen, or their investment nationalized, to name a few examples.. -

mrtksn 1y ago
Good point but I think these are about the choices you make. You can choose to look after your metallurgist who become obsolete as a laborers but I'm sure they are amazing people. You might be worried for becoming communist or welfare state though. You can choose to limit trade and other freedoms so you can artificially keep metallurgists at work so you don't have to share what you have with them without exchanging something. This can help you can feel good about not giving away freebies and pretend that this is a meritocracy but suffer from slow progress and other conflicts related in preserving these artificial limits. You can just choose to leave them to suffer as long as their numbers are not enough to bother you. This one gives you the good life until suddenly it stops doing that if the numbers go up enough. I guess in this case it was to ignore the "losers" in the system until they become numerous enough to tear down the whole system. A lot of people who vote for obvious frauds and outright fascists(I'm not talking about USA, but in general) are just anti-establishment who don't mean bad but just want to see the current order teared apart at any price.
- sgc 1y ago

mediaman 1y ago

The idea that the hard goods are sold for "imaginary numbers" is popular but a bit of a misnomer. These "imaginary numbers" are actually claims on future income generated by the United States economy. It is true that they are "imaginary", in the sense that any property ownership is imaginary in a way that a toaster is not. The most common form is Treasuries, which the government then pays interest on and which must eventually be either repaid or rolled over. So it would be more correct to say that China is trading hard work building goods in exchange for claims on future US income.