Building vs buying

As always, a great post today by James Wolcott.

He offers words from an inteview (in Le Figaro) with Emmanuel Todd in which he points out the US is a consuming nation, no longer a builder of things. Truth is, industrialized nations control the world and not nations whose people just partake of the spoils.

But what people have not wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of consumption."

[snip]

The great weakness of this economic system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial capacity.

Considering the US's only real manufacturing is of weapons, what incentive is there to NOT promote war and conflict. Without these, where would we find a market for our "goods"?

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