Everything in the world has a shelf life including powerful empires. Human history has shown that great empires usually go through a period of gradual decline after reaching the peak of their political, economic and cultural dominance. The great American empire, however, is fixing to be an exception. Unless Americans walk Trump back from the edge, their empire will not go through a period of decline but will fall with a thud in one historical instant.
One may doubt the contention that US President Trump has brought America to the edge, but not the determined way other nations are rearranging the world economic order half presuming the US is falling off the cliff. Hopefully nations do not go to war when transitioning from the old to the new order. A third world war will most likely be nuclear and could result in the annihilation of the human race. Nations need to realize this and instead start a conversation on a new set of assumptions for a humanizing new economic order that will replace the old dehumanizing one.
These assumptions, as economists I’ve read or listened to are suggesting, include but are not limited to the following forgotten essentials:
1 - Business is for the benefit of all (labor, consumers, the community at large and the environment) not just its stockholders.
2 - It is not capital that grows the economy but consumption. When people are given higher wages, shares of profit and part ownership of the business, they consume more and thus grow the market.
3 - It’s not competition but cooperation that creates a bigger market. One business cooperating with another gives us two. But one taken out by another through competition leaves us with just one.
4 - The market does not balance itself. Left to itself, the market will be at the mercy of the most powerful competitor. Cooperation keeps it balanced.
5 - Greed, which subsumes competition, is not good, not moral. This is the most critical principle the new order has to live by. It’s greed that competes and kills the market.
Pope Francis, who died when I started writing this, would have agreed with these assumptions. It will make good sense for global and local businesses to start operating according to these assumptions. If Capitalist greed can lead to wars of extinction on the global level, the same greed can lead to destructive and costly civil wars on the local or national level. How much is the communist rebellion costing the Philippine economy? And how many are paying for it with their lives?
The new economic order also calls on small nations like ours to grow in self-sufficiency especially in food, education, health and other basic necessities and make them available equitably to all.
Trump is merely hastening it, but the old order is crumbling for being based on wrong assumptions. The new world order, to benefit all creatures (yes, not just humans) must be based on a new understanding of man, society and nature. Either that or we perish in the deadly fallout of human greed.