The essence of free-market ideology since the first half of the 19th century until now has been that competing firms were efficient and represented the best way to run society. Governments would overspend; organised labour is selfish; barriers to the movement of capital services and labour should be reduced to the minimum. This is neo-liberalism in a nutshell. The reality is, of course, very different, as firms tend to move to monopoly or oligopoly, and so inequality increases. This is not the place to expand the argument into economic theory. Neo-liberal economics has been widely practised across the world for the last 50 years.

Well before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, US war planners were envisaging the defeat of Germany and Japan and the break-up of Europe's various Empires. They imagined the creation of small independent nations, umbilically tied into the US dollar and planners drafted blueprints for the United Nations. The ideologies of Pax Americana, Providential Exceptionalism and Universalism led a large group. The move of America to rule the world was rampant ambition over any specific political or economic need. This blog outlines the new global infrastructure the US set up post-1945 to rule the world.