High costs of living is a feature of Western economies, not a bug. We have financialized, deindustrialized economies, with greatly inflated debt and cost structures for all of the basic necessities of life. Education, healthcare and medical drugs, housing, utilities. Because this is the best way to suck wealth out of the real economy of production and consumption into the oligarchical elite that acts like a parasite, without anyone realizing what's happening, like a slowly boiled frog. With the added effect that Western workers are forever priced out of industrial competitiveness.

These are deliberate policies made regardless which flavor of president resides in the White House. Corporate donors run the country. The "revolving door" insures that crony capitalism corporatocracy carries on unabated, where former FDA staff goes to Big Pharma, former FAA staff goes to Boeing, former Treasury staff goes to Wall Street, former army officer goes to the military industrial complex, etc. Western Europe of course follows this example.

Products, markets, workforce training and recruitment, supply chains etc, that is hard work and difficult to figure out into a productive profitable business. Private wealth will opt out of this dirty work, if it can. That is simply because there is comparatively a far easier alternative for capital: to buy up assets that already have established revenue streams, and then proceed to game the system by manipulating markets and legislation and regulators to artificially inflate those revenues. So here you have the reason why Americans pay $700 billion a year for prescription drugs, why housing takes up 40 % of your income vs 20 % a few decades ago, inflated student loans, inflated and highly leveraged stock markets with stock buybacks (because apparently there are no productive investments to be found), and so on. Banks in the West do not lend money for developing industry. In the US, 80 % of the lending is for real estate and mortgages.

Meanwhile, industry suffers from a lack of investment. This is being called a post-industrial service economy, which is a bollocks concept. It's more like a slide back into neo-feudalism. Current generation is doing worse than their parents, and sorry to say but this trend will continue until the system is fundamentally changed. Economics as an academic subject has been corrupted to serve the interests of the elite. Their purpose as useful idiot academics is to obfuscate these basic truths about the economy and economic history. We are brought up to believe that our economies are the most efficient and advanced the world has ever seen. It's really only efficient at concentrating wealth at the top. Not only do they get a bigger slice of the pie, the pie as a whole is also shrinking. Working people in the West are double fucked.

Not only that, to accelerate the deindustrialization, private wealth will use its capital to destroy perfectly viable businesses. This is done buy buying a controlling share in a company, then cutting all investment and R&D for the future, and cutting costs, so that in the short term, the company looks like it's performing well (and triggers wild compensation packages to executives). But it's only a matter of time before the company fails, and its assets are consolidated into the rent-seeking economy of fake markets. This practice is called "private equity".

The single most important factor that allows for this is the role of banking, money and finance. These are simply too important for a nation's economy to be left in the hands of an "independent" central bank and private banks. Money and banking needs to be a public utility, or else they will have a self-serving interest to grow by any means, including inflated debt and cost structures, which will happen instead of productive investment in the real economy. "Financial services" is an ever growing share of Western economies. Whatever GDP growth we have is found in this sector. Meanwhile, in the BRICS and global south, their GDP growth occurs in actual productive industry. Western economies are double fucked. Money that is paid to serve inflated debts and inflated costs is money that could've been better spent on buying equipment, training your workforce and paying wages. Money as a public good is demonstrably the way to insure that it will be allocated where it's needed to build industry, to have a thriving economy, to build up communities and give the people a real opportunity to earn a decent living.

You can go and study economic history and find that in every case where you find tremendous economic growth and thriving economies that work for the people, they had state run banking with low or zero-interest loans to develop industry. England up to 1600s, Russia in 1800s, Napoleon's France. There is one country today in particular where money and finance is a public utility, and where speculation in the stock exchange is in effect prohibited. They seem to be doing quite well, having in a few decades gone from a country of 1 billion poor people to 800 million today living a modern lifestyle by Western standards. In fact, it's the greatest economic achievement in all of history. Forecasts project that this class of people in that particular country will grow in the coming decades by an additional 300 million people that today are still living in poor rural villages, as low tech industry is being moved further inland. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out which country this might be.

They are operating on capitalist principles, and they spin the surpluses back into development of more productive industries. In the West this is taken as a premise, a basic assumption that this is what happens in capitalist economies. Well, clearly that is sorely mistaken.

Nobody in their dealings with China is being forced into things under the barrel of a gun.

China is interested in money and security, and is shrewdly pursuing these goals.

In contrast, look at the West's colonialism and Middle East adventures. Same interests, of course, but without qualms about using violence to fuck over other people and nations in order to achieve their aims and to feed a military industrial complex.

Your conclusion on the best course of action is well reasoned and logical, and one that makes the most sense for the US in terms of geopolitics, national security, finances etc. This is not how the US operates. It acts for the benefit of its special interests, found in the defense and intelligence industrial complexes. There is no strategic goal to attain in these campaigns except for endless war and profits. Destroying the secular Iraqi state during Gulf War II made zero strategic sense, as it had been a balancing force against the Iranians. For the locals, I'm sure the US today seems like an ogre that aimlessly stumbles around with overwhelming might, wrecking havoc in its path.

Which is precisely the point. It's been long since any consideration to societal benefit was taken when it comes to the military-intelligence-police-prison-media-industrial-complex. At this point, it serves no other purpose than to enrich our oligarchs.

Yes, from a societal point of view. But it is also profitable, for a select few. As a society, rather than accepting what are natural human behaviors and affording care to minimize societal detriments, we choose to reward people that take advantage of these behaviors and exploit weakness in men.

Profit at all costs, especially when they befall society as a whole rather than your own bottom line.

War Is A Racket is in need of a couple of addenda.