Thread by @wmhuo168

Exhibit Q8: The Empire That Milton Built. Then Gutted.

America is in decline. But this wasn’t caused by China, or Russia, or immigration, or wokeism.

The culprit is Milton Friedman. And the class that turned his ideas into a wrecking ball. (1/17)

asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/The-re…

Friedman taught that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. From that seed grew a system that stripped America to its studs and sold the drywall to China. (2/17)

In this worldview, workers are costs. Communities are irrelevant. The nation-state is an afterthought. Only shareholders matter. If that means dismantling your own country for better margins, so be it. (3/17)

For 40 years, U.S. elites followed this script. They slashed taxes, deregulated everything, gutted unions, and turned capital loose to roam the globe. (4/17)

What did America get in return? Walmart shelves full of cheap junk. Cities gutted. Industrial policy banned by economists. And a generation trained to believe that national decline was a virtue. (5/17)

This wasn’t some invisible hand. It was conscious policy. The WTO, NAFTA, and permanent MFN status for China all served the same goal. Eliminate borders for capital. Trap labor in place. (6/17)

Washington sold this as modernization. What it really did was euthanize the U.S. working class. A $15 warehouse job replaced a $40 union factory job. That was called progress. (7/17)

Financialization replaced production. Strip-mining companies for cash became a skill set. Private equity raided nursing homes, telecoms, newspapers, and hospitals. Americans died. Investors thrived. (8/17)

The political system followed. Congress became a trading floor. Regulatory agencies became career pipelines. Even the Fed became an asset price maintenance machine. (9/17)

By the time China rose, the damage was already done. We handed them our supply chains. We trained their engineers. And we laughed, because it boosted corporate profits. (10/17)

Then we panicked. Not because China cheated. But because we realized too late they were building a nation. And we had stopped doing that decades ago. (11/17)

Today the U.S. spends more on pet pampering than on nuclear engineering. Wall Street decides where the chips get made. The people who caused this still run policy. (12/17)

This wasn’t a decline. It was a controlled demolition. Neoliberalism lit the fuse. Harvard and McKinsey handled the wiring. (13/17)

No foreign enemy has done more damage to America than the bipartisan elite who worshipped efficiency, denationalized the economy, and monetized collapse. (14/17)

They didn’t just fail the American people. They replaced them. With spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and cheap foreign labor. All for a few points on the Dow. (15/17)

The empire didn’t fall. It was looted, downsized, and outsourced. And the looters wrote the textbooks. (16/17)

Milton Friedman will never be tried. But history will render its verdict. China didn’t kill the American dream. Neoliberalism did. (17/17)