This is me paraphrasing what Peter Schiff says:
To understand the world economy, imagine that a Japanese man, a Chinese man and an American get stranded on an island and need to divide the workload. The Chinese man gets assigned the task of hunting and the Japanese man gets assigned the task of fishing. The American man then gets assigned the task of eating the game and the fish. A modern economist sees this and concludes that the American is essential to the driving force behind the economy because without his ravenous appetite there would be no demand for game and fish.