Your country's economy in a nutshell

[vulcanlogician]

I'd like to quote a passage from Neil Stephenson's cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash:

This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you
got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have
guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the
worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances
here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once
things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in
Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has
been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North
Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has
taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global
layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know
what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery