The second wave, one year on: Greenland, anyone?

[This is a follow-up to my manuscript "Why economic inequality ...", see philpapers...KORWEI-2] After 2025 saw failed attempts at economic `liberation', i.e. projecting internal inequality onto the world by essentially shifting the burden of re-distribution from the US rich to everyone else, 2026 is now bound for an accelerating death spiral of attempts at political `liberation', i.e. the capture of non-US resources to gloss over mounting failures within. As the underlying economic causes of discontent remain unaddressed, culture war talking points have to be radicalized into Carl Schmitt-style decisionist arguments; unsurprisingly, `great' men still think that (their) might makes right. After economical `liberation' has largely failed, political `liberation' is basically the admission that economic competition with autocratic socialism has become really hard: Giving up on directly competing with China, frantically grabbing other nation's resources has become a strategy now. But the basic problems are not solvable through a revival of imperialist and fascist ideas; western democracies have to learn how to use and distribute limited resources more efficiently themselves. Capitalism's core strength, the ultra-flexible (self-)assignment of labor, becomes less and less relevant for demographically stagnating and highly automated economies. For such economies, the ultra-efficient assignment of natural resources become key -- with nations like China already well on their way to develop the tools for AI-planned autocratic socialism. The problem is thus not that well-managed democracies could not learn to live with low-growth, 'cold' economies; it's that they might be no match for autocracies with AI-driven socialist resource use and distribution.