> The world prospered more than any other time in history under Pax Americana. <
Good comment. And Pax Americana differed from Pax Romana and Pax Britannica in that we weren’t out for conquest (at least not much).
Our undoing will be our arrogance. We simply must be a major player everywhere, all the time. And when we say “jump”, we expect everyone else to immediately jump as high as they can. Sooner or later the rest of the world is going to get tired of that.
Pax Americana started after WW2. For several decades CEOs were earning from 20 to 40 times the pay of their lowest level workers. Then around 1980 a greed mentality seemed to inflict the business world and in the next decade CEO compensation jumped to levels 200 to 1000 times the wages of their low level employees. Complaints about the Greed mentality of corporate heads began to be heard. To support these outrageous wages, corporate heads sent businesses overseas so their extravegant pay could be paid on the backs of third world workers while keeping their stockholders happy.
Manufacturing in the US subsided, and salaries for workers that once were adequate failed to increase remotely like that of top corporate heads. Finally the bubble burst in 2008. I remember when the Goldman Sachs stockholders revolted at their Spring 2008 meeting and 43% voted for a proposal to have a stockholders advisory on executive compensation. The CEO, COO, and CFO were all earning more than $65million. While the proposal did not win, 43% was enough to scare management, and the next year the CEO was only paid $25million. Around the same period, my GE stock dropped from over $50 a share to $5 a share. When I read my annual report informaation I was very angry to see that in that same period 11 top employees were earning above $10million.
More recently we have seen how one drug company helped prevent our nation from learning how to use low cost and safe medicines and supplements to prevent Covid deaths. This was to keep people from learning how to help themselves, so they would be desperate to use the new experimental vaccines that the government would pay for to save their lives. How many hundreds of thousands of people died because of this corporate greed practiced between the time effective early treatments were proposed and vaccines were finally available?
This is indeed the arrogance that has been our undoing, creating much disturbance among the people of our country. The standard move is to blame it on Democrats or on Republicans, whan it is corporate greed and failure to understand this that is to blame.