[FredPret]

I actually agree with many of the points you made here, especially your two policy proposals.

But I don't think you can mention the US in the same breath as imperial Belgium. Leopold was surely one of the low points of our species. But the Brits, for all the bad things they did - including in my native country - were the least bad empire up to that point, and forcibly ended slavery.

My broader point is that certain cultural values lend themselves massively to economic and technological development. European nations got these values by random chance, and then used this economic edge to then colonize the world. How else could tiny Belgium utterly subjugate the Congo?