Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

Because everyone is just flourishing under the US world order.

I think the US ideals of freedom of speech/thought/religion are great, but unfortunately the US "ideal" of greed seems to be what the US is better at exporting.

The lesser evil, any country with Western norms has my vote. Nothing is perfect

That freedom of thought is free insomuch that it conforms with the dominant ideology.

Many states have bans against people serving in government jobs if they are communists. How is that free?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/23/anti-c...

https://www.dailybulletin.com/2013/01/13/california-law-keep...

1. Many states is 4.

2. The Supreme Court has ruled that these laws are unconstitutional, so they are completely unenforceable.

Not everyone, but the current, post-Soviet, US-led world order has seen the greatest reduction in world poverty probably ever in history. South Asia is heading from being poor to being middle income, the AIDS epidemic is in retreat in Africa, etc. My home country of Bangladesh was known for its extreme poverty when we left in the 1980s. Now, thanks to capitalism and westernization, poverty has plummeted, and it is on pace to become a middle-income economy by 2021.

The "US-led" part has very little to do with that reduction in world poverty; if anything, it's all about countries other than the U.S. adopting the same sorts of market-based norms and institutions that the West themselves adopted in the 1980s. To think of socially-beneficial innovations as "Westernizing" just because the West got there first is pretty clearly a fallacy - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

Strange take. I’m socialist and communist countries, the rich make their money off government corruption. In the US rhe rich make their money off providing value to people in the free market.

For you, east is China, Mideast and subcontinent only, right?

I will leave you this quote from History of the New World by Girolamo Benzoni:

Egg of Columbus

"Columbus being at a party with many noble Spaniards, where, as was customary, the subject of conversation was the Indies: one of them undertook to say: —"Mr. Christopher, even if you had not found the Indies, we should not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same that you did, here in our own country of Spain, as it is full of great men clever in cosmography and literature." Columbus said nothing in answer to these words, but having desired an egg to be brought to him, he placed it on the table saying: "Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all." They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility."

Western norms, could also be India/Japan from my point of view

When I look at a list of billionaires, for most of them I don't see any kind of value that they generate to society. In fact you will even find criminals like Donald Trump.

You should read john perkins then.

Nationalistic flamewar is against everything this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t believe you’ve actually looked up a list of billionaires then.