Adam Butler

I invite you to sign up for my Substack: The Choice Engine.

Here's my latest article:
The Trade Deficit is Made in America
The Greatest Trick Capital Every Played: Convincing America the Trade Deficit Was China's Fault

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thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-trade-...

🚨Must Read!🚨:
The US lost a 'war' with China 20+ years ago when we abandoned production for financialization. The most dangerous quality of the current moment is the “temptation…to attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic decline by… military means.”
thetricontinental.org/studies-on-c...

The evidence supporting therapeutic benefits of entactogens and psychedelics vastly exceeds any evidence of negative effects.

Remember Alan Watts: “You’ve got to go out of your mind to come to your senses.”

The banality of an educational objective is revealed by whether AI can deliver A+ work with naive prompting.

The goal of education in the present moment should be to teach students how to employ AI creatively to amplify the breadth & depth of their work product.

Finally figured out DSPy and now realizing I need to spend the rest of my life on data curation.

Or I can just use Gemini-2.5-Pro with silly prompts and let it figure it out.

Circling back to bsky after a few months and find Travis building cool software with AI. Someone else who gets it. Awesome.

China is crafting a multipolar economy rooted in sovereign development, technological self-reliance, and coordinated diplomacy—backed by real productive capacity, not nostalgia.

Without structural change, tariffs are just noise on the way down.

Tariffs are a nationalist reflex in a system still ruled by Wall Street.

Meanwhile, China isn’t trying to revive the old order—it’s building a new one.

American workers aren’t “too expensive” because of wages or tariffs—they’re crushed by debt, rent, insurance premiums, and financial extraction.

The real drag isn’t a trade imbalance—it’s the US financial sector bleeding the real economy dry.

China doesn’t redirect finance toward industry.
They don’t insulate key sectors from speculation.
And they do nothing to make U.S. labor uncompetitive.

But the material base for that dominance—productive industry, global goodwill, internal unity—is gone.

Without changing the parasitic structure of the US financial sector, tariffs are just symptoms of decay.

6/6 Tariffs Alone Won’t Build a New Order—They’re Clinging to the Old One

What the U.S. seeks with tariffs is not a new system—it’s a restoration of lost dominance.

China plans in decades, not quarters. It integrates trade, infrastructure, education, and labor development under a unified vision—driven by statecraft, not market speculation.

The U.S. has none of this. It operates on quarterly earnings and election cycles, not national development horizons.

Tariffs without structural change are just nationalist theater performed for a decaying electorate.

5/6 No Strategic Depth

A tariff is a tactic, not a strategy. Real development requires control over finance, coordinated public investment, long-term technological goals, and the insulation of key sectors from external shocks.

China offers what the empire never did: infrastructure without subjugation. It doesn’t ask for loyalty—it offers co-development under shifting global terms.

While Washington is building walls and bombs, Beijing is building roads.

U.S. tariffs serve as a catalyst—forcing nations to confront the costs of dependency.

You can’t sanction the world and expect loyalty in return.

4/6 Tariffs Accelerate Revolt in the Periphery

Global South countries now face a choice: remain subordinate to an extractive system in decline, or align with emerging centers of capital and sovereignty.

While the U.S. imposes sanctions, China builds supply chains—promoting yuan-based trade, launching competing platforms, and embedding itself into Eurasian, African, and Latin American trade corridors that bypass Western chokepoints.

Each new tariff drives targeted nations to reduce their dependence on the dollar, build alternative institutions, and deepen regional alliances.

Tariffs fuel the very breakup of U.S. financial empire they’re meant to defend.

3/6 Trump's Tariffs Undermine U.S. Financial Hegemony

In weaponizing trade, the U.S. is hastening the decline of its own global position.

Firms are expected to serve national development goals, not extract maximum short-term profit. Capital is subordinate to the strategic needs of the state, not the other way around.

The American elite seeks to contain economic fallout without altering the structures of class domination that caused it.

Tariffs that protect monopolies without discipline simply create new rentier fiefdoms.

By contrast, China disciplines capital.

2/6 Preservation of Class Power, Not National Industry

These tariffs aren’t about rebuilding the economy. They’re about protecting the profit margins of bloated monopolies that hollowed it out in the first place.

While America played empire, China played industry.

Now one prints sanctions, the other prints steel.

Meanwhile, China played the long game: investing in productive forces, building industrial ecosystems, and shielding its economy from Western financial capture—ensuring that sovereignty over industry remains a matter of state strategy not market whim.

After decades of outsourcing and gutting public infrastructure, the U.S. is now trying to patch up a decaying economy with trade barriers.

It’s not reindustrialization—it’s damage control.

You don’t regrow a burned down forest by fencing off the ashes.

1/6 Protectionism Without Production

Tariffs signal the end of a unipolar economic model that enriched a domestic rentier elite while hollowing out productive capacity.

You can’t rebuild an economy with tariffs when the factory’s gone, the workers are broke, and Wall Street owns the land.

China knows this. That’s why it’s winning.

Trump’s tariffs won’t rebuild the U.S.

It’s imperial decline wrapped in red, white, and blue.

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Posting this thread over here because it articulates the current economic dissonance so well.

Here is the source (couldn’t find him on bsky)

Full thread text below

🧵👇

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