Don Klipstein > wrote:

> Mark Nobles wrote:
> >Geoff Miller wrote:
> >> Mark Nobles writes:
> >>
> >...
> >> > And they all exhibited a degree of hubris that led to their downfall.
> >>
> >> Therefore all empires will exhibit the same flaw?
> >
> >History has never produced a single counterexample. Every great nation
> >has been reduced eventually. While past performance is not a guarantee
> >of future performance, it is a pretty good indicator.
> >>
> >> Not that the U.S. is an empire, contrary to popular assertion. Leftists
> >> love to play the "all empires fall, and America will, too" card. But it
> >> doesn't apply to America.
> >>
> >> Countries with empires seize and hold territory and integrate the terri-
> >> tories' economies into that of the mother country. While we've done
> >> occupations, we've gotten out of them as soon as doing so was practicable.
> >
> >
> >Gosh, I wonder if the Cherokee and Seminole and Iroquois Nations would
> >agree with that assertion?
> >
> >> We've never held onto any more land in foreign countries than we've needed
> >> to bury our dead. Having military strength and cultural reach isn't the
> >> same as having an empire.
> >
> >Yes, you got something right. But US power doesn't rest on military or
> >cultural strength, it is economic strength. The weakness of empire is
> >that nations become dependent on wealth being imported from the
> >colonies to the motherland. The US has been different in that we have
> >produced enough wealth internally that we have not become dependent,
> >and have, in fact, been sharing the wealth.
>
> What? Say what?
>
> How do you measure national wealth?
>
> Most optimistically - growth in market prices of assets after paying
> bills and liabilities? Discount major bubbles (like a major recent-year
> housing one), and how much wealth did USA gain after discounting value of
> assets for inflation?

Close, but you are describing income, not wealth. Wealth has nothing to
do with growth, but with the mere value. Even a beater car counts as
wealth, not just (as you would have it) the profit taken by the dealer
when he resells it.

> USA has huge trade deficits! Consider how much money the USA is
> exporting for oil and petroleum products, manufactured goods and cocaine!
>
> I dare to hazard to guess that a majority of the USA's collective
> individual income is in a group consisting of:

Here you even admit you are talking about income, not wealth.

[irrelevant examples deleted]

> Back when Japan was the latest "rising sun" and Reagan was still in
> office, and with his presidency covering the awfully brief period that had
> USA going from "world's greatest creditor nation" to "world's greatest
> debtor nation", Japan and not China was the "economic enemy" (my words).
> Back then, a columnist in one of the two major big-city-metropolitan-area
> newspapers my way said something along the lines of USA producing
> pie-cutters and leaving the baking to the Japanese! (I paraphrase whoever
> that was here with condensation, although I do note a quip in that
> relevant article being somewhat along the line of USA's response [to
> economic challenges of the 1980's] to be producing a bumper crop of
> lawyers! That columnist in that article saying that said that [with
> wording that I cannot rember word-for-word about 20 years later] the
> USA was shifting towards pie-cutting industries while leaving the baking
> to the Japan!)

You have a point here, but not quite the one you seem to intend. China
does have enormous _potential_ wealth. Huge, smart and educated
population and enormous natural resources. We could even use this to
predict that the next superpower will be China. But they aren't quite
there yet.