Where did I say "US government". Even so, the US government makes money from the activity of US companies through something called corporation tax. Even the illusion of a “national” internet economy collapses under scrutiny. The global digital marketplace runs on American rails. The payment network is overwhelmingly controlled by Visa or Mastercard, the checkout may pass through processors like PayPal or Stripe, and the platforms hosting the transaction are frequently owned by firms such as Amazon, Google, or Apple. Even the servers behind the scenes are commonly rented from infrastructure giants like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Each layer takes a cut. Even in China, dominated by Alibaba or Tencent, international transactions, foreign card acceptance, software dependencies, and global financial clearing still brush up against American-controlled systems somewhere along the chain. The uncomfortable conclusion is that in the architecture of modern online commerce, it is extraordinarily difficult for a digital payment to occur anywhere on earth without some American entity, somewhere in the stack, taking a cut. Even when remittances are cash-based, the system often still runs through American-linked infrastructure. The world’s largest money-transfer networks—such as Western Union and MoneyGram—are U.S. companies that built the global agent networks allowing someone to hand over cash in one country and have it paid out as cash in another. Behind these transfers, the settlement frequently moves through U.S. dollar clearing and correspondent banking relationships tied to major American financial institutions, and messaging or compliance processes may rely on global financial infrastructure such as SWIFT, which operates under strong U.S. regulatory influence. As a result, even when a migrant worker physically hands over banknotes at a local counter and the recipient collects cash on the other side of the world, the transaction is often routed, cleared, insured, or regulated through systems in which U.S. firms or the U.S. financial system play a central role—meaning that even the most “cash” form of international money transfer still tends to touch American financial architecture somewhere along the chain. But I get the impression you are one of these hard left peopl ine favour of a North Korean hermit state, where you can draw up the bridges, and establish a nationalist workers paradise, without caring about the outside world at all. I'm more of a free trade conservative Thatcherite type of person myself.
