I'll try to explain it as objectively as possible.
In his recent talk with Tucker, he starts out defending the blob, and he later expounds on it in 1.5 hour talk. The central proposition is "no blob, no pencils". Meaning that pencils consist of a large number of materials, many of which come from different countries, and if one of those countries decides to do an export ban, then you do not have pencils. So you need a blob to put pressure of those countries, or destabilize them, or corrupt judges and labor unions, or coup them, in order to be able to have pencils. That is, he says, necessary for American prosperity and safety. He says he does not want MAGA to preside over the 'demise of the American empire'. At the same time, he completely backs what is being done by Trump et al. right now, and he disagrees with methods that are at odds with what he views as 'American values'.
I get a bit annoyed by this argument. Every country in the world has pencils, and no blob. For the materials, there is perfect competition, so even if Malaysia puts an export ban on, nothing will happen. Also, while putting diplomatic pressure may be legitimate, corrupting judges and labor unions (which he seemed to explicitly endorse) are not in my view.
Thoughts? Is he having second thoughts? Did they get to him? Is he playing devil's advocate to prevent people from going overboard in his view? Was he always a double agent (no, he wasn't)?
Why do you think India buys oil in dollars or SA sells oil in dollars? Because we make them do it, and we benefit hugely from it.
US dollar is the reserve currency because we used military, CIA, USAID, and other tools to force that on them against their own self-interests.
If we didn't do these 'immoral' things then what would happen? Everybody wouldn't just live in peace and prosperity, China would do it and our economy would be at most 1/4 the size - in fact they may be doing it right now, to US.
You can take the principled stand and be fine with working 4x harder than Chinese, for less wealth, as long as you understand that's what you're calling for and that most Americans won't want that.
The problem with USAID, from a US or even Western perspective, was not that they were fucking with other countries, but that they got infested with crazy liberals that were not using it to benefit America but instead their own personal insanities.
If we didn't do these things China would fucking die because we'd stop literally giving them all of our money. People would stay away from their cartel, whatever is left of it, because they'd get more money trading with us and we wouldn't be stealing it.
The weakness in our economy isn't because we just have a weaker economy than China (we don't). It's because the blob is supported by multi-national corporations that are maintaining their hegemony by undermining the American economy because it is our economy that would threaten them with competition.
It's like saying the Slave Plantations in the American South built American wealth. Wrong: they stunted it. Slavery was a wildly expensive luxury belief system which generated personal wealth to elites, and not to the general marketplace who were basically convinced to stay out of cotton industry unless you had a plantation.
The blob maintains the Corporatism. The Corporatism then claims to be the center of all wealth and development. Instead it's the very thing that is rewarding our enemies and holding us back.
How did the US dethrone UK? Because we had more people and industry and resources.
China has all that. There's no world in which China just "fucking dies" unless they kill themselves (which is what the good USAID money went to, among other things).
India, Russia, the rest of BRIC just will decide not to trade with China because 'China bad'? Nope.
You're confusing the bad USAID/meddling with the good, and Mike Benz specifically mentions this how the bad USAID is now going to protect multinational corporations that don't benefit or represent the U.S. any more (whereas they did before like 1970). Listen to what he says and I bet you'll actually agree with him.
Considering that culturally, they seem to have your average corporate mindset, that being; Short-term profit at all costs, cut corners whenever possible, and always have a public image of being completely together no matter how low the "days since last accident" number is....
China has worse people, industry, logistics, efficiency, and more.
The CCP's collapse is nearly guaranteed if the US went back to containment like it did prior to Nixon. No one has benefited from Chinese manufacturing, only the CCP.
You don't actually want China to kill itself, because it means a Chinese Civil War, and you can expect 200 million dead from that if China's history is anything to go by.
BRIC is barely even able to organize itself together.
That's almost exclusively what all US international meddling is for, even going back to the Spanish American War. This isn't a 'recent' thing. Alexa, what is "The United Fruit Company"?
lol why do you think this is?
You are exactly what Benz is concerned about - people who don't understand that if you waved a wand and the dollar wasn't the reserve currency our economy would shrink 3/4 overnight and whoever takes the mantle would be that much stronger. Without dicking over other countries this would have happened decades ago.
The reserve dollar puts every other country on a treadmill, where it looks like they're running fast but aren't catching up to us. We mess with the speed sometimes, trip them up, and they go flying off the back. If we just stop the treadmill they'll not only catch up but go shooting past.
I agree that the Petrodollar has been fantastically useful to the USA. That said, the deal is that the USA lends its military might to grant stability and legitimacy to the ruling factions of the OPEC nations, in exchange they trade oil in greenbacks.
The USA don't need a corrupt, wasteful bureaucracy for that. The USA needs strong leadership and a capable and effective military.
We don't even need OPEC and Saudi Arabia. We don't even need Canada with their marshes. With our off-shore drilling we are energy independent.
I get the Petrodollar Scam is a good con for us. But we don't even need that. The American economy is the greatest in the world and it's not close. We just have to stop being willfully retarded.
China only exists because we allowed US corps to become oligarchs, abuse our own nation and ship all their actual production to china and elsewhere.
Those corps don't exist in slite of government, they exist because of it. Government protects big business with nonsense like corporate personhood and not enforcing US labor standards on companies selling in the US.