[sebmellen]

Devil’s advocate:

If you (the US) massively subsidize the world order through your financial markets, military defense, and foreign aid, it’s only fair that you get to take advantage of your position.

Historically, the US has done this at the expense of its working class. Now there is a populist feeling that we are owed a long due “payback” for our generosity.

The Bernie/AOC left believe the payback is owed by our elites, who enriched themselves by austerity and hollowing out our industrial base.

The Trump/MAGA right believe the payback is owed by other countries — freeloaders that have benefited from our technology, military defense, and foreign aid while simultaneously being net exporters to the US.

To the latter crowd, the kind of “bullying” behavior you describe is actually the equivalent of a gentle giant who never stood up for himself finally deciding that he won’t take any more shit.

Edit: To any downvoters, please comment with where you think I’m wrong. I’m not defending any policy, just providing what I believe is an accurate representation of the populist American mindset described in the parent comment.

[lunarlull]

> To the latter crowd, the kind of “bullying” behavior you describe is actually the equivalent of a gentle giant who never stood up for himself finally deciding that he won’t take any more shit.

Assuming this generous interpretation is accurate, then it's a problem of ignorance of the people holding this view. Characterizing other countries as 'freeloaders' is exactly that - ignorance.

[AlecSchueler]

Also, what about all the coups, military operations, political pressure etc etc? Was that the gentle giant?

[tock]

America is the richest country in the world. That is the payback. Yet somehow the working class is screwed.

People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists". It's an emotional response. I'm scared how far they take it.

[sebmellen]

Right, and I think that’s largely true.

Whether or not the “right wing working class” are right in their root cause analysis, the domestic situation in the US is catastrophic enough to demand explanation:

  “If we are the richest country on earth, why can’t I afford a house and healthcare?”

Answer 1: You are being taken advantage of by wealthy elites within your country!

Answer 2: The whole world has made Americans front the bill for a regime of global peace, security, and a trusted reserve currency, at the cost of you, the American worker!

Depending on which answer you choose, and which camp you ally with, your worldview will differ.

[tock]

I know. There is no reason to believe in #2. Its an emotional response. And so you cant change it. Just like you cant use logic with a flat earther. And that's scary for the rest of the world. I just hope no wars happen.

[sebmellen]

There is if you believe the “globalists” are the same people from #1. It doesn’t help that there is some appreciable degree of overlap.

Dona nobis pacem!

[fspeech]

Housing and healthcare are the two things that have little to do with trade. Housing affordability is almost entirely policy driven. In a "free" market (quoted because the definition typically doesn't take into account the necessity of a functional society to maintain property rights and values, just ask Detroit), housing affordability is entirely dependent on one's relative income and propensity to spend, i.e. you can have high absolute income (say in NYC) and still find you desired housing unaffordable. I think people intuitively understand this. Healthcare costs are more complicated but is also almost entirely a domestic issue.

[billy99k]

"People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists"."

If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'. There's nothing emotional about a methodology that has failed over and over again.

[budududuroiu]

Well, we’ve been going through wealth redistribution towards the “elites”, and no one batted an eye.

China popped the real estate bubble, collapsing entire industry giants and making the “elites” swallow the financial downturn. Literally allowing the “poor” to refinance their homes on the back of the “rich”, because they believe housing isn’t for speculation, but for living in.

Tariffs without windfall profits tax will be further wealth redistribution, from the poor to the wealthy

[oblio]

Or, alternatively, it's called "taxes" and "wealth redistribution".

High inequalities is proven to be bad for development, so clearly there is a point where people have too much and it's harmful to society.

Ergo it would be immoral to allow some to hoard wealth infinitely, just because they can.

[Whoppertime]

That is begging the question. The question is not "Why are some people poor" that is the default state of humanity, and has been for the past 100,000 years Homo Sapiens have existed. The question is what are the succesful doing right. It is not because of "hoarding wealth infinitely" that a doctor has more money saved up than someone addicted to drugs and living on the street. It is their decisions that lead to their current circumstances. The doctor spending a decade in medical school and residency has delayed a lot of gratification getting their, while the drug addict likely had some issues with impulse control or delayed gratification.

[tock]

Politicians should just come out and say this to the people. Oh you can't afford a house? Oh you cant afford healthcare? But we are the richest country in the world. And the system is fair. It means you didn't earn it. Duh.

[lunarlull]

Most of those people didn't earn it directly, but via exploiting people working under them and not paying them a fair share for their work.

[cloverich]

Communism is control of the economy via government owning the businesses. What you are describing is taxes in a free market system. They are not the same thing, and being convinced they are is the majority of the problem.

[mumong05]

haha

[AlecSchueler]

> If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'.

Like taking money generated by the labourer and giving it to the company owners to share with their idle families? And threatening unemployment and precariousness/homelessness for those who disagree? This seems to have failed again indeed

[mcv]

> If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'.

No, that's capitalist. That's literally the core of capitalism.

[cachehit]

>If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'

No, it's taxation. A pretty common phenomenon.

[mcv]

Indeed. Taxation is as old as civilization. Civilization is built on taxation. The first writing systems, the first numbers, the first money, it was all invented to enable taxation. People should finally quit being so childish about this. Unless you want to go back to the stone age, taxation is unavoidable.

[mindslight]

> freeloaders that have benefited from our technology, military defense, and foreign aid while simultaneously being net exporters to the US.

I'm not trying to jump on you for having captured it, but the problem is that this is wholly nonsensical - the repayment for benefiting from our technology and military defense IS the net exporting to the US (via holding our currency). That "logic" is still based on having one foot in the paradigm of the financial engineering puppetmasters where getting real physical goods is somehow a liability rather than a benefit!

For sure, this enviable position has had a corrosive effect on our economy. But the inability to deal with that has been wholly down to self-inflicted policy wounds of previous decades - chiefly led by the Republican party marketing a game of fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the government is prevented from taking deliberate action to mitigate the displacement of industry and workers, while the increased (but now centralized) wealth from offshoring (and other technological/economic gains) was merely handed over to the banksters in the form of low-interest loans that went into driving up the asset bubble.

[sebmellen]

Best comment in the whole thread. And thank you. This is a useful and clear analysis.

[f33d5173]

The US has always been incredibly mercenary with their investment. If there was a way of squeezing more blood from the stone a previous president would have done it. You learned about economic policy yesterday. Now you think that picking tariffs by throwing darts can do better than seasoned economic expert trying to maximize benefit to the US. It's just laughable.

[sebmellen]

Did I ever defend a particular industrial policy? No. You misread my comment.

My comment was intended to give the GP poster insight into the mindset of Americans who revel in the “bullying” behavior they described.

But one point of inquiry — how are foreign aid programs like USAID mercenary? Even if they are CIA fronts, it’s hard to argue that they are in any way economically extractive.

[cmurf]

Supposedly they have a seasoned economic expert on staff, Stephen Miran. Is this guy a kook? It wouldn't surprise me, Trump had Laura Loomer at the White House and 1/2 an hour later three members of the National Secure Council had been fired.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2025/01/0...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/politics/trump-nsc-fir...

A central problem with this administration is it's headed by a psychopath, who has a long track record of being an untrustworthy liar. Could he pick an economics team that can actually make hard choices that are generally better for America? It's possible. But it's also possible these are just more kooks, or corrupt people looking to grift, or people who think like Peter Thiel, that democracy is over and needs to be replaced by a monarch.

My take? Impeach and remove Trump from office. Do it now. If the country wants these kinds of policies, they need to do it through the Congress. Not through a president, sane or insane.

[walterbell]

> Supposedly they have a seasoned economic expert on staff, Stephen Miran. Is this guy a kook?

https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump...

> Currently a senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital Management LP and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, Miran holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University and his dissertation advisor was Martin Feldstein, an eminent American economist who chaired the CEA during the Reagan administration.

> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”

[cmurf]

We don't actually know if Trump's tariff strategy is Stephen Miran's strategy, nor do we know what Stephen Miran thinks of the strategy.

What we do know is that Trump disproportionately attacks people who criticize him, withholds security protection from them, and sometimes even sends mobs to have them assassinated.

It also took some time before Mark Esper told the public that Trump ordered that protesters be shot.

Therefore, I think it's possible we won't get Stephen Miran's honest assessment in the near future. We'll just have to wait and see.

[walterbell]

Miran is CEA chair, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Economic_Advisers

> The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the president of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.

[mcv]

It's clearly the Bernie/AOC left who are correct here. The US forced this world order on the rest of the world, and massively benefitted from it, so the payback is not owed by the rest of the world who had this forced on them (though they benefitted too) but by the wealthy elite, who benefitted by far the most from it.

Look at the number of multibillionaires the US has acquired over the past 40 years. The trillion dollar megacorps. The many millionaires in Congress. Those are the people who owe payback to the American public. But those are also the people who control the American public, control their news, and feed them misinformation.