| A few bones to pick: 1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1]; 2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway; 3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2]; 4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation. There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around. 5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3]; 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else. If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end: > [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business. So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [3]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labo... |
Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.