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Comment by corimaith | Hacker News Reader

>for free to the US would suddenly have a big existential problem

No they're not sending it for free, the US dollars and IOUs are real and ultimately translated into maintaining the salaries of millions of factory workers. Thats the whole point of export driven growth. Trying to abstract away the balance sheet as imaginary is not how real economics works.

The CCP, the IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc certainly aren't thinking like you are, growing consumption has proven extremely difficult in practice over growing industry.

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That "consumption" is such a difficult thing to do is a preposterous idea, since you can always set things on fire. These theories are all make believe.

I mean, what makes american so special in their ability to consume? An african can watch football on their 54" TV just as well as an american. Just ship this crap there instead of in the US if you're so concerned about consuming it.

It's trade imbalance! You ship stuff, and the IOUs you get in return are never claimed. It's no better than shipping stuff in Africa and getting Zimbabwean money in return. Everyone knows that it can't be claimed for anything tangible, except from other countries who also owe fealty to the US and are forced to give this currency value. If everyone "asked" for something in return of those IOUs from the US itself, they'd get nothing of tangible value in return. These IOUs only have value insofar as the US is the world police.

>That "consumption" is such a difficult thing to do is a preposterous idea, since you can always set things on fire. These theories are all make believe.

Well if you believe so you can go present your findings to policymakers or the CCP rather than in internet forum comments. They would be VERY interested to know what revolutionary insights you have that hundreds of economists are unable to solve.

Propaganda is supposed to be for the proles. Whatever those bureaucrats say is not the candid truth, that should be obvious to anybody. Once the elite begins absorbing it at its first level of speech, it's a sure sign that the nation is in decline.

We don't refer to the same problem. This problem you're referring to is not about finding those people who have the ability, so rare among non-american people, to consume stuff. It's about ramping up production while at the same time paying tribute to the US. This is, indeed, a difficult problem to solve and no doubts requires the best minds of the economic academia world.

However, the nature of the problem changes once the US stops being the world police. The problem becomes figuring out what's the pecking order now.

Setting stuff on fire is easy. Setting stuff on fire and getting paid for it in a way that you can pay your factory workers is a lot harder.

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