The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

>compete

Have as your "goal" less the desire to "win" the global competition for corporate profits & corporate headquartering of multinationals in your nation simply on grounds of labor/profit competitiveness, and take a more nationalist view of, where necessary, having state run enterprises or "free market" competition within your borders but not complete free trade in a global sense.

In other words, do no necessarily pursue as your goal to structure economy either to have most profitable companies that reduce costs by moving labor around the world to find cheapest workers, or those which try to export the most. Have as your goal at least to produce domestically as much as possible to satisfy domestic consumption demands, as well as having some minimal threshold of employed domestic workers.

As it stands, US has a massive trade deficit, and a decades long decline in working age male population, especially in "flyover" US regions where manufacturing has declined the most while not being replaced by equivalent jobs. These regions also have declining population, rising suicide & opiate death rates, declining family formation / birthrates.

The "telos" of our society should not put as its "end" an economy, especially one which pursues profit above all.

The economy should be a tool in service to outcomes we actually desire.

Like software built to do a job, not simply designed for the production of specific features.

This is where global financial capitalism (as the US has a giant capital surplus which balances its trade deficit) needs to be called into question.

Internal free markets is one thing. But not having a national industrial policy which prioritizes the well being of domestic workers and their families over well being of multinational corporations and banks makes our system quite degenerate over time.

People should really take a few minutes and watch these 2 videos explaining the current account[0] and capital account[1] relationship, and understand that how we operate now is a political choice, which has massive consequences on who benefits of this system accrue to, and who pays the costs of this system.

This system is maintained by having the reserve currency and the state using strong efforts over many years to not only maintain this GRC but strengthen it, not allowing the natural devaluation of the $ that would close these 2 imbalances and more closely balance capital and labor.

Also, it is not a requirement to have a well developed economy and run massive trade deficits or not have a thriving industrial sector. Germany and Japan are 2 examples that do not run giant trade deficits like the US [3]

https://youtu.be/dirBYVjDk7A [0]

https://youtu.be/AimYG1jYD0A [1]

https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-germany-shock-the-... [3]

We can look at a timeline of the account history for paulsb.

Last comment on the account: 2012

Last post on the account: 2013

7 years of inactivity

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If it were them coming back to their old account, given how regularly paulsb commented while still active, you would think there'd be at least a few recent comments showing some kind of ramp up in re-usage of the site.

> To compete, you really do have to cut minimum wage. You have to loosen regulations, and importantly, you have to do massive tariffs / sanctions on China for the next decade.

Part of the problem here is that the existence of some kind of universal "more regulations / less regulations" slider is an illusion. It allows the problem to be cast in partisan terms when that isn't the problem at all, because the problem isn't more or less lines of regulatory code but rather higher or lower regulatory efficiency.

Some regulations save a thousand lives at a 0.02% increase in costs. Repealing those is bad. Enacting them is good. Some regulations save two lives at a 5000% increase in cost, which could equally be saved by some less expensive regulation. Enacting those is bad. Repealing them is good.

The real problem is that politicians lack the qualifications and incentives to do this well. If good rules don't exist, then someone gets hurt and there is a call for "more rules" rather than "better rules". Politicians who don't know what they're doing pass bad rules. The bad rules cause costs to exceed what they are in China, so manufacturing moves to China. Then the local lobby for improving the rules evaporates because there are no longer local manufacturers to propose or lobby for more efficient rules, and the continued existence of those rules on the books causes no more to form.

We clearly need to throw away the existing rules -- they're not working -- the question is, how do we actually get better ones?

> True, but he said he said that simply because Bernie did, and it played well against Hillary in the primaries.

To be fair, Trump has been saying that since the 80s... Of course that didn't stop him from manufacturing in china himself. The guy talks the talk but rarely walks the walk.

> He didn’t do anything that actually slowed the loss of our manufacturing base while president.

And that's why he lost. But boy did he make israel safe. How many arab states did he force into recognizing israel? 4 or 5?

Trump's achievements were making israel great again and forcing mexico to extend intellectual property rights by a few years so that he can selling his "Trump" name in mexico for a few more years? Not that things are going to get any better with biden.

But then again, it's naive to think the president hold any true power. The power are held by those behind the scenes. Politicians nowadays are entertainers to keep the populace distracted. Presidents come and go, but the powerful remain.

I think the only reason that a global reserve currency hasnt changed yet is that there are no sound currencies to use. USD was selected as the global reserve because it was backed by gold. We went and fucked that up. Now there are no currencies left backed by anything but promises. If there was a large enough country with gold backed money the reserve currency would have switched decades ago.