Do They Want Us to Fail?

October 24, 2025

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

Life is a 162-game season. The goal is to be in first place at the end of the season. Strive to improve every day. Be patient and persistent. Do good things.
– Yours Truly

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

Amazon prefers robots to humans
Will Amazon lead to a worker-demand decline?

Generative AI is shockingly ignorant
Garbage in, garbage out.

The girls who found God
Is a revival underway?

THINKING OUT LOUD

Do They Want Us to Fail?
We expose their failures

Do you ever get the sense plenty of leaders and bureaucrats around the world want the United States to fail? Why would so many countries, most especially plenty of those who claim to be our allies, want to see us fail?

What is it they don’t like about us? It’s that we expose their weaknesses and structural fallibility.

Our ingenuity, resilience, integrity, successful immigrant assimilation, and the American Dream all showcase what true freedom can create, which the great majority of countries around the world do not possess.

Freedom also creates room for error. And we have made plenty of mistakes. The creativity and resilience built into our systems means we can make mistakes—and still ultimately succeed. We can learn and grow from mistakes. We innovate around them. We get to trial-and-error our way to discoveries that change the world.

Countries without freedom lack the freedom to try, fail, try again, and eventually prevail. Countries with heavy and pervasive bureaucratic systems lack the slack to take big risks and the resilience to survive if they fail. Instead, failures can break them. In authoritarian regimes, failures threaten leaders who can lash out in ways that risk life and livelihood.

By succeeding so often while other countries stall out or fail, we threaten their illiberal, at best, approaches to freedom, economy, and society. And that threat can, to many of them, feel existential.

And now leaders can no longer control the flow of information. When you lose control of the message, you lose control of the people. Leaders around the world have a much harder time hiding their faults these days. More and more people are learning about their respective government’s inefficiency, unproductive activity, and self-dealing. The internet has broken the dam on what elites and bureaucrats for so long had the power to contain.

So what’s an increasingly irrelevant and disdained bureaucrat class overseeing managed decline to do? Wish for the failure of the one country that is making their failure impossible to hide. And they have some tools in their kit to attempt to do just that.

For decades, European elites and bureaucrats have been pushing climate narratives and policies that seek to limit the US from extracting our natural resources. This is their attempt to force our energy costs to match theirs—notoriously expensive and economically crippling—and make us reliant on other nations, sometimes malicious ones, for energy. If you refuse to embrace your own natural resources to lower your energy costs, force the US to raise theirs.

China is also in on the climate grift for self-interested reasons, as they have positioned themselves to be the world’s dominant “clean energy” product supplier. If you can exploit Europe’s and America’s green energy dysfunction for your gain, go all in, and burn enormous amounts of cheap coal along the way.

Why not exploit your workers, too? China is more than willing to pay millions of workers near-poverty wages that we cannot and will not match. This has been their lever to drive more of our labor overseas, which has hollowed out our middle class and now threatens our own economic sustainability. If keeping your people on the edge of poverty is what it takes to decimate the US’s once thriving manufacturing communities, that’s a good deal. Why not traffic in some opioids while you’re at it?

Then there are actors like Russia, North Korea, and, again, China looking to flood our social media with propaganda to divide us from within and even convince some of our own citizens to join their cause. If you don’t want to give your citizens freedom of speech, exploit America’s to create chaos on our shores, erode our national trust, and wear us down so dramatically that a crisis large enough could take us down as a global power.

If these countries succeed, then the pressure is off. The US will no longer loom large and underscore their flailing governments. Their people will simmer down. And the powerful will remain in power.

Or at least they hope. Their failure to understand the value of freedom does much more than keep them stuck in ineffective governance and economies. It keeps them from seeing that a collapsed America would likely collapse the world. Then even the elites would wish they’d joined us instead of beating us down.

THE RANDOMS

Since Europe’s climate change policies won’t allow them to extract hydrocarbons from their own countries, they’ve been importing Russian gas and financing Russia’s war on Ukraine. So how many people have been killed in Ukraine because of Europe’s climate change policy?

The EU just issued its 19th package of sanctions on Russia. If the previous 18 sanctions didn’t work, why aren’t they taking a different and more forceful approach? How many more people are going to die because of EU bureaucratic bumbling?

China has supposedly grown a commanding lead in manufacturing because of their use of robots. They now have more robots working than the rest of the world combined. Some worry the US is too far behind to catch up. Europe? They are even further behind. So here’s the question: If China has such a lead using robots, what jobs do they have for their one billion citizens?

It appears a great number of people participated in last weekend’s “No Kings” protests. Do these people believe anyone in this country is capable of becoming a king? They must not know our history or how our political system works.

The No Kings movement seems to verify how poorly educated and/or knowledgeable many people in this country are. Or maybe it tells us that too many people have too much time on their hands these days. As the saying goes, An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.

I recently wrote an essay about the consequences of government policy. Here’s a new way policy can run amok: More people are under reporting income so they can get more Obamacare subsidies. That means the government is collecting fewer federal income taxes while it’s simultaneously paying out more in health insurance subsidies.

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

Inflation picks up a bit
Consumers keep spending
When will Chicago go bankrupt?
Turnaround or meltdown?
State-by-state poverty rates

Labor

More jobs coming to rural America
AI is making hiring harder
Is jobless growth the new normal?

The Health Scene

Health insurance, it’s unaffordable
Blood test breakthrough spots cancers
Retinal implant restores vision

The Lone Star

Houston getting another new factory
Shoe company moving factory to Austin
Solar shingle company moves to Austin

BUSINESS

Finance

Private credit returns have peaked
Could credit woes cause stocks to fall?
BDCs are under the microscope
Lessons from a Wall Street loser