"For a couple of decades after World War II, the West basked in the warm
glow of distributive justice, the mixed economy, diversity, the rule of
law at home, and a rules-based international order. Economically, these
values were served extraordinarily well by the centrally planned,
US-designed global monetary system known as Bretton Woods, which allowed America to recycle its surpluses to Europe and Japan, essentially
dollarising its allies to sustain its own net exports.

But then, by 1971, America had become a deficit country. Rather than
tighten its belt in Germanic style, the US blew up Bretton Woods and
blew out its trade deficit. Germany, Japan, and later China became net exporters, whose dollar profits were sent to Wall Street to buy US
government debt, real estate, and shares in companies that the US
allowed foreigners to invest in.

Then, the American ruling class had an epiphany: Why manufacture stuff
at home when foreign capitalists could be relied upon to dispatch both
their products and their dollars to the US? So, they exported whole
production lines abroad, triggering the deindustria-lisation of
America’s manufacturing heartlands.

Wall Street was at the heart of this audacious new recycling mechanism.
To play its role, it had to be unrestrained. But wholesale deregulation
needed an economics and a political philosophy to support it. Demand
created its own supply, and neoliberalism was born. Before long, the
world was awash in derivatives surfing the tsunami of foreign capital inundating New York’s banks. When the wave broke in 2008, the West
nearly broke with it.

Panicked Western leaders authorised the minting of $35tn to refloat the financiers while imposing austerity on their populations. The only part
of these trillions that was actually invested in machinery went to
building up the cloud capital that gave Big Tech its pervasive power
over Western populations’ hearts and minds.

The combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for
the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech’s cloud
capital gave birth to a Brave New West ...

With Europe rendered impotent by its inability to federate political
power after it had federated its money, and the developing world more in
debt than ever, only China is left standing in the West’s way. The
irony, however, is that China does not want to be a hegemon. It just
wants to sell its wares unimpeded.

But the West is now convinced that China poses a lethal threat. Like Oedipus’s father, who died at his son’s hand because he believed the prophecy that his son would kill him, so the West is working tirelessly
to push China to take the plunge and seriously challenge Western power,
such as by turning the Brics into a renminbi-based Bretton-Woods-like
system.

In 2024, the West continued to grow stronger. But, with its value system
in the gutter, so did its penchant for engineering its decline.

– Project Syndicate
Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of
the MeRA25 party and Professor of Economics at the University of
Athens."

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"In 2024, the West continued to grow stronger. But, with its value
system
in the gutter, so did its penchant for engineering its decline."

No know the West as a whole well enough. But for the US which is
supposedly an Entrepreneur society. Together with strong advertisement,
people would relentlessly chase wealth for liberty and happiness more
and more. Resulting stress, if kept within limit, would foster
innovation. If out of bound, would eventually break up the society.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)