[rayiner]

> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"

San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.

[walleeee]

I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.

I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.

I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.

[nradov]

The US hasn't done anything to prevent Bangladesh from being as rich as, let's say, Singapore. Rather the opposite.

[rayiner]

With respect to Bangladesh specifically, the U.S. has helped much more than it has hurt.

[hollerith]

>the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means.

I don't believe that.

Like most countries, the US has a community of professionals in government dedicated to the country's national security and this class of professionals has often done harm around the world by trying to increase the US's national security when it is already more secure than most countries are. For example, the US's overreaction to 9/11. For example, the US's overthrowing of Communist governments in the third world during the Cold War.

[defrost]

And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

etc.

[hollerith]

It does: but the US did those things for national security goals, not to make the US richer.

Often those things made the US considerably poorer, e.g., the US intervention in Vietnam, e.g., when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.

During the Cold War, the US encouraged international trade to show the world the benefits of trade and of capitalism and as a bribe to try to get and to keep countries in our military coalition against the Soviets. Often the encouragement and the bribe included Washington's opening up the US consumer market to imports (i.e., without tariffs). But it did those thing for national security reasons (i.e., stopping the spread of communism) not because the US needs to import anything or to export anything or to steal anything from overseas to be the richest country.

Yes, international trade makes the US richer than it would be without the trade, but the US would still be the richest country even if it did zero international trade: its not like China or Germany whose economies are highly reliant on international trade.

[defrost]

The Iranian coup d'état was literally about allied control of oil to secure control of global flow of oil and energy related wealth.

Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.

> when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.

Or, alternatively, recirculated trillions of US taxpayer dollars into US weapons, US mercanaries, US personnel, and fed pork barrels where directed by US lobbyists.

[rayiner]

> Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.

No the two things are quite different. There are many rich countries (Singapore, Denmark, Taiwain, etc.) that don't have extensive security operations around the world. The U.S. uses its wealth for ideological reasons, not to become richer. This is something that people with a third-world mindset have the hardest time understanding about the U.S.

[hollerith]

Yes, the US was involved in the coup in Iran, but again not as part of some plan to enrich the US. (They didn't want the Communists in control in Tehran and they didn't want Soviet warships and Soviet shipping in general to be able to operate from Iranian ports.)

Since the world is complicated and people are creative and opportunistic about how they try to make money, certain American individuals and certain small conspiracies of Americans probably tried to make money off of the US's interventions in other countries, but the US government as a whole basically never has -- at least not in the last 100 years.

While the US economy was dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf (approximately from 1957 to 2020) it used military force and pressure on governments to ensure American companies could buy Persian Gulf oil, but those American companies always paid the going price for the oil: Washington never tried to arrange so that any American interest got oil from overseas for free or for less than the fair price for the oil.

So I still haven't seen any example in this thread of Washington's extracting any wealth from the rest of the world other than through free trade, i.e., trade in which the non-American half of the trade entered into the trade voluntarily. (And again the US economy doesn't even need to engage in any free trade with the rest of the world for the US to be the richest country.)

[rayiner]

> And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.

We did that for ideological reasons. The U.S. was already one of the richest countries in the world per capita at the time of the founding. It was about as rich per capita in 1800 as India is today (in nominal dollars).