A (44:29)
Now let's talk about the debt. Essentially one way of thinking about last X number of years is the US started as this giant exporter. For example, there's this amazing visual of US trade to China. This is this famous cartoon that shows, after all, the Philippines are only the stepping stone to China, okay? And it shows Uncle Sam laden with all these goods and stereotypical Chinese person is portrayed there. And they're just portrayed as a market that wants bridges and trains and so on and so forth. So the US started back then. The US was a good exporter and China was an importer, okay, 100 something years ago. So what happened was the US started as an exporter, then all countries started to use the dollar because they could buy goods from the U.S. then by degrees, the U.S. went from a manufacturing power to just a pure financial power. And now it's a purely financial power without the manufacturing because it outsourced the manufacturing and so on. But it's also actually outsourced even the financial part now to Bitcoin and crypto and it's outsourced the media part there. So every piece of the American empire has gone to either China or the Internet, right? And one way of thinking about what the American empire's business model was, dollar inflation is global taxation. So think of America as like a factory worker Uncle Sam that worked his way up to become CEO of the world. And as CEO of the world, they control the global economic system. For example, it's the UN headquarters in New York. It's the fact that even like Chinese companies would go public in the U.S. it's the fact that all these heads of state are trained at the Kendi School of Government at Harvard. It's the fact that US regulators harmonize regulations globally. And there's a McDonald's everywhere and Hollywood everywhere, right? The US was the center of the largest empire ever in human history. And the way it monetized that is, is dollar inflation is global taxation. Those five words explain a lot because a lot of libertarians and conservatives in America think that they're paying the rest of the world. It's actually the reverse. The world is being taxed to pay for American profligacy. There's no way. Like the thing is, if you think about it, net it out. Somebody in Vietnam is grinding away to send these shoes over, right? These Nikes, what do they get in return? They get database entries, they get printed dollars, right? So the US is producing nothing in return for those shoes. What's it producing? It's producing database entries at a deeper level. Why can it do that? Because it is the hub. It's the center of the global system. And when it was working, the American military, the right, guarded all the sea lanes and protected all the trade routes and kept the peace physically. And actually the American left with the State Department signed deals with 190 plus countries and did all the diplomacy. And that's really underestimated by the way, if you've ever done a deal with a hundred people, let alone 100 funds, right? Imagine what that is for a hundred countries, right? The American diplomats were by far the best ever in history, just like the American military was the best in history. So when it was working, when left and right worked together, they had all the diplomacy and all the military, all the money, all the media, they had everything working. So every country, even Russian and Chinese people sent their elites to train in America and so on and so forth, right? This is the era that you and I grew up. It's total, total dominance. So the thing is that the way that that dominance was, was monetized was dollar inflation is global taxation. And what that meant is some, some people would hold dollars literally in bank accounts or their multinationals hold it. But lots of people around the world were de facto taxed because their countries would hold treasuries and the US issued those treasuries or those countries would be harmonized to U.S. regulations or their countries would have multinationals operate there which were getting dollar flows back, basically that business model. It also meant the US could freeze things, it could sanction things. Anybody who's a competitor, like Russia or China or Iran could have sanctions and tariffs imposed on them. The control of the center, like root power over the global economy was this enormous, enormous, enormous thing, right? Global empire was like, you know, today you have Republicans like Buchanan, actually not today. He's been around for 20, 30 years. But he says stuff like a republic, non empire, right? Because he thinks that empire was net worse for Americans, right? And then you have the left which says it's also against empire. And they're like, oh, America's going and BLE these countries killing People, right? So both the, the left and the right, the far left, far right if you will, are against Empire because these guys think it's bad for Americans. These guys think it was bad for the world. But I will argue that at least for a period, it was good for the world and good for Americans because Americans kept the world order. So it was good for the world on balance. I'm not talking about all the blowing up and so on and so forth. And it was good for Americans because it got a huge cut for stuff they hadn't worked for because dollar inflation is global taxation. And that's why there was this incredibly high standard of living. Right now what is happening is Democrats and Republicans are both sawing off the branch on which they're sitting, right? Democrats, for example, doing the Russia sanctions, which you can argue whether they were merited or not, but doing that essentially catalyzed de dollarization in the rest of the world. I can show graph after graph on that.
