He’s conflating a few things. I don’t think becoming an illiberal democracy is the same thing as becoming a dictatorship. Still sucks for America though.
When the regime can abduct and deport anyone without respect for legitimate independent judicial review where they can present evidence, democracy is absolutely gone. The only rule is the Dear Leader's whim.
If they can do it to any individual, they can do it to anyone, and "anyone" includes their opponents.
Yes, we have lived for many generations without these threats, but do not let Normalcy Bias blind us to the real and present danger. Democracies are often tipped into autocracy, and as with crossing the event horizon into a supermassive black hole, the particular moment of crossing may be barely noticeable, but the impending spaghettification is no less inevitable. If the balance of power in the three co-equal branches of government are replaced by one regime who ignores the others, the regime also ignores the people, by definition. The people will need to be become ungovernable to regain their sovereignty, or remain subjects of the regime and its whims.
Come on. There's always a way back. Or a way to something different. Human societies and governments reorganize all the time. Often with much sound and fury.
There is indeed always a way back, but that phrase is doing a LOT of heavy lifting!
Yes, people have overcome far worse authoritarian regimes.
But, remember: the cost to overcome authoritarians always goes up as a regime consolidates power.
An unconsolidated authoritarian regime can sometimes be voted out.
With some consolidation, toppling a regime may require "merely" weeks of protest by 5% of the entire population and general strikes that make the country ungovernable.
As the regime escalates, it may take full-on violent revolution with blood in the streets and govt buildings to restore the sovereignty of the citizens.
Sound and fury, indeed. This is not what any sane person wants. There is always a way back, but are you and everyone you know and love prepared to do whatever it takes to get it back? Or do you feel it is OK to trivialize the effort required because you think you have so much privilege you expect others to do the fighting?
Yes, there's ways of getting rid of dictatorships, but they tend to be unusual/extreme such as mass protests or revolts.
I did just see a news alert that the judge in the "deportation" (kidnapping) case is considering contempt of court for the Trump administration - will that work?
Viktor Orban's Hungary is illiberal. North Korea is a dictatorship. One is bad, the other is worse.
The danger of conflating the two is that you're setting people up for false expectations. If you go around telling people that Hungary is a dictatorship just like North Korea, and then they visit Hungary, they might away with the notion that Orban is not so bad. Nobody is starving, and they won't happen to notice the reporters in prison. You run the danger of undermining your own credibility.
I'm not convinced that you can have one without the other.
A dictatorship is when you have a leader or group of leaders with almost no limitations on their power. That would seem to apply to both Hungary and North Korea (and also the U.S. if the courts are powerless to enforce law abidance by the leader).
I suppose that I consider illiberal "democracies" to be a flavour of dictatorships.
Going from the definition in Wikipedia (though it does mention a lack of consensus on the exact definition):
> Elections in an illiberal democracy are often manipulated or rigged, being used to legitimize and consolidate the incumbent rather than to choose the country's leaders and policies
As a result of that, they got into some really successful negotiations with a lot of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I think they want to keep the subject on the news for as long as possible.
And then I imagine they'll probably silently drop the tariffs, because those are harmful for them.
The horrifying thing is that they don't have to. They hold all the cards now. They can drop their new trade barriers at will. Maybe they'll ask for concessions. Maybe they'll leave them in place to kill off troublesome competitors. Maybe they'll coerce the affected companies into selling to Chinese-owned interests at a steep discount. Maybe they'll just take a bunch of bribes.
This is how a trade war looks. And we're losing. Badly.
What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.
There are no fewer dollars in the US dollar currency area after the sale than before… but those dollars are worth less than before. If capital has not left the area, it has been destroyed. That’s not to say that the US economy is inevitably doomed… but you sound very bullish.
They are not worth less in dollar terms. The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros.
And the exchange rate of barrels to tomatoes hasn’t changed as that is a productivity issue.
There is no universal chart against which value is determined. Instead there are ever moving currency zone orbits, possibly shifting financial savings around.
> They are not worth less in dollar terms. The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros
By that logic you are saying if the US dollar to Euro went 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 there would be no impact because the same number of dollars will still settle the mortgage or tax bill.
I didn’t say my disaster scenario was going to happen, I’m using it as an example to show that if it does, surely there will be an impact.
Like when you graph something and you say, ok, what happens as it approaches zero or infinity. We learn from the extreme cases and use that to inform our understanding of the middle ground.
In concrete terms, the US is not an island. It does not manufacture, grow and produce everything it needs. Many things are imported. If the US dollar keeps going down, all of those things get more expensive. The dollar number of the mortgage won’t go up (until it is renewed) but everything coming from outside the country will.
Currencies go up and down all the time, making things more or less expensive.
>They are not worth less in dollar terms. The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros.
If only our living expenses were just taxes and mortgages, amiright?
This take reminds me of the old joke:
“I don’t get why people complain about gas prices going up. I used to put in 40 bucks, and I still put in 40 bucks.”
Do your living expenses consist entirely of imports, and why would the price of that be going up given there is nowhere else for them to sell their stuff?
Prices go up if there is scarcity and no effective competition for your purchases. Is that is what is going to happen?
Living expenses are pretty tied to your 'scarcity', yes.
Transportation and home heating or cooling costs will go up when petro products rise. Oil is scarce and globally priced. Gas for the car is 3% of household income. Utilities are 6-7% of income
Fertilizer costs rise. Nitrogen-based fertilizers come from natural gas, and phosphate and potash are globally priced and often imported. That means higher costs for farmers, stacked on top of rising fuel and transport expenses. That's foods already 10-15% of income.
So food gets more expensive from every angle. Inputs, shipping, storage. All of it.
So that's 20%+ of household expenses hit.
Education costs go up too. Foreign students now effectively get a discount if their home currency strengthens and universities are expert at making that squeeze when they have room to raise prices without losing demand (if students still come, if they don't come well...education costs also go up to make up the shortfall of high paying foreign students).
>Do your living expenses consist entirely of imports
Almost - either imports or things produced and run using imports.
Of course if you make above $200,000/year your "living expenses" related to consumption of food, clothes, house goods, gas, etc. are a tiny part of that. For most people that's not the case.
I don't mean to suggest that the current American devaluation is as large as the UK's 1967 devaluation, at least so far. Just that your reasoning here is wrong: when your currency falls, that has a domestic inflationary effect precisely because your currency is worth less than before.
What has that got to do with this thread? A devaluation's a devaluation, whether you're forced into changing a fixed rate, or have it imposed on you by the markets.
> The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros.
If nobody wants dollars, then to import things it's necessary to send more unwanted dollars, so the exchange rate does up, so everything imported is more expensive, so you have inflation, so the interest in the mortaje goes up, so you have to pay more.
[Hi from Argentina! Been there, done that, got a pile of worthless bills as souvenirs.]
> Where is the excess Argentinian beef scheduled for the USA going to find a market?
The offer is elastic too. A previous government added too many task and restrictions to the export of beef, so the producers sold the young cows instead of letting them grow to get more mothers. After 2 or 3 years the numbers of reproducing cows was so low that we almost had to import beef from Uruguay. IIRC the land was converted to soy farms, because exporting soy had a lot of taxes but not as many as beef.
"You will have higher prices because stuff you buy is more expensive."
Why? Why won't the supplier have lower income because they have no other alternative than to sell for the same USD amount as they did before?
Why is the supplier always the price setter? Can you always charge your customers anything you want to and they keep buying?
The customer is king, but not when FX is involved? How does that work?
"What do you think inflation is?"
It's a general rise in the entire price range. If the price of eggs goes up, but your wage didn't then that is a redistribution of scarce resources, not inflation.
On the mortgage and tax bill specifically, sure there is no impact.
But I (an American) pay for some European services in Euros, meaning those got 10% more expensive. I understand this might be the intended effect, but it's not good for me.
>But I (an American) pay for some European services in Euros, meaning those got 10% more expensive.
European services would be the least of issues. The main issue would be the tons of foreign imported food, cars, products, clothes, gadgets, and so on - including tons of component parts for "american" products (not to mention materials and tooling to make even the increasingly rarer "100% made in US" products).
Where else are they going to sell all that stuff given there isn't an untapped source of demand to absorb it (or that demand would already be serviced).
So what you have is a production glut, and nowhere to shift it to. Which usually causes a price collapse and production collapse.
Which then causes unemployment in the source nation and interest rate cuts...
Not as much, as they can route around the issue, selling elsewhere. The import (or things "made in USA" but depending on imports) represents like X% of US good consumption, but each players' US exports represents a much smaller (and falling) share of their total exports.
The world is much wider in 2025 than it was in the 1980s or even in 2000 or 2010. 2025 United States's Share of Global GDP: 12.7% (project to fall to 11.x in the next 5 years). It was around 40% in 1960s, and 25-30% in 1990. US represents in average 20% of China's exports across various categories. The max % seen is about 25% for consumer electronics segment.
But that’s because you decided to take on currency risk without hedging or having a matched foreign income stream.
That’s not what anybody with scale will have done.
And now you have to reevaluate the cost of that service relative to the alternatives - including letting them know they need to take fewer Euros to retain your custom vs the competitive alternatives.
Customers are hard to come by. Are they prepared to let you go?
"You were arguing that the same number of dollars will get me the same number of goods and services, which is not true."
In aggregate within a rational competitive framework.
It is true for those that are rational and subject to competition.
Where else are they going to sell their stuff? Why would you agree to pay more?
Your behaviour will change, as will everybody elses - and you're the customer. So you go back to them and say no I won't pay any more. Haggle. Are they going to turn you away?
Why is you agreeing to pay more more important than the other person who decides it is too much and cancels the service?
Changing the goalposts is assuming you, and everybody else, are always a price taker, passively accepting what you are given. That's describing a monopoly/oligopoly scenario.
Would this mean minimum wage workers the world over effectively being paid in dollars rather than their local currency? (Because their salary in local currency would rise and fall with the dollar.)
Or would wages be reset, say, annually based on whatever the level of the dollar was at the time?
I dunno, it feels like it would be ceding control over a chunk of your economy to the whims of the US political process. (Because of course it will be Americans forcing labour to be more expensive in Vietnam, not Europeans forcing labour to be more expensive in America… the Americans would never accept that.)
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