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Uncle Sam cannot get a better deal from Vietnam than free. Vietnamese women grind in factories to produce Nikes, while Uncle Sam sends them printed money in return. Who is ripping off whom? DOLLAR INFLATION IS GLOBAL TAXATION There is just a fundamental misconception about what the USA actually is. It is the seat of a global financial empire (or was). It makes its money by printing it. For example, it printed $1.25T for just one purchase back in 2010. Do you know many Nikes you’d have to sell to make a trillion dollars?!? The reason the American Empire had the right to print a trillion dollars at its whim is because it was managing the global financial system for everyone. So it had the right to impose global taxation via dollar inflation. Every time it printed $1T, that was divided by the 6B+ direct and indirect dollar holders worldwide, not just the 330M Americans. In other words: the whole world paid the US to run the empire. And got diluted down (aka taxed) every time the US printed another dollar. That’s why Milton Friedman said inflation is taxation without legislation. Anyway — the USA could impose global taxation via dollar inflation because it was a stable jurisdiction for multinational business, due to Delaware. It issued visas for scientists and workers from all over the world. It didn’t have psychos bombing cars, shooting CEOs, or blocking roads. It advocated free trade, respected property rights, and only sanctioned rogue states. Now all that is gone. The US is no longer a neutral arbiter of the rules-based order that it once set up for its own benefit. And so it’s going to lose that money-printing power. But before it goes, you should understand what it’s losing. Because the money-printing business model was way, way, way more profitable than working for a living. Yes, it had long-term negative consequences, but in the short and medium-term (meaning: multiple decades) it had absolutely no peer. Exiting the money-printing business to return to the abandoned manufacturing business is likely not even possible because of the societal instability such a sharp decline in living standards will cause. Anyway, the people who ran American Empire could have spent this money more wisely. They could have taken far better care of their own citizens, and dropped fewer bombs on non-citizens. Then they wouldn’t be at this juncture. But *how* it spent the trillions is distinct from the indisputable fact that the US printed trillions in the first place. So the American Empire as an entity wasn’t being ripped off by the world, especially by countries like Vietnam. More the contrary.