"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers."
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Most people do not realize that it was Adam Smith who wrote this famous characterization. He was writing about narrowly mercantilist nature of the British Empire and its colonial market strategy. The exploitation of the Empire's resources and peoples by a few legendary companies is well known.
If one substitutes 'crony capitalists' or 'financiers' for 'shopkeepers' it might well be a decent fit for the latter years of the American Century's empire, which is based on a regime of guns and dollars.
As the Boer War marked the high tide for the Brits, and the invention of the concentration camp in their frustration, the American Century seems to be on the wane as well, resorting to camps of a sort of their own.
What broke it? Why is the American moment running out of steam? It is probably the failure to move to a non-military based economy after the cold war, and invest the peace dividend into domestic infrastructure and basic technology development for peaceful purposes and the improvement of life, instead of financial legerdemain, economic hoaxes and frauds. The stagnation of the median wage is telling.
Having fed so well for many years on war, the crony capitalists had to expand their operations at home again, and create new wars, to maintain their exorbitant privilege.
Will history judge them harshly? It all depends on who ends up writing the history. As the famous epigram observes:
"Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?Perhaps not so much as treason in this case, but plunder, and the betrayal of oaths and trusts, and fraud on a grand scale. But this control of history and the interpretation of events is a major component of the credibility trap that impedes legitimate reform.
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
We may see more action on Sunday evening depending on the developments in Europe. I believe the Iowa straw poll results for the American election will be released tomorrow, but they do have a spotty record of forecasting the primary results.
The elections will be interesting as they will represent a major power struggle, but conducted largely 'behind the scenes.' It is confusing I know, since the candidates have a somewhat wispy and ephemeral character about them, more like an ad for toothpaste than a profound and substantial leader of the free world.
We seem to have left those kinds of leaders behind several decades ago. Or at least the leaders are still out there, but they cannot obtain the leverage to make it into the selection process which is dominated with the taint of corporate money and the vested interests that seek only to maintain the status quo, the public be damned. I am not so much an idealist as you might think, having first started observating politics during the Kennedy era, with the Nixon and Johnson administrations that followed. I even recall the dark days of McCarthy and the Watergate hearings.
Politics is always a dirty business. But at least there was some hope that things would get done, and that a love of country and the Constitution would prevail at the end. One has to reach a bit for that feeling these days. There has always been a bad element. It is just there as a minority, and not prevalent and so widely accepted and tolerated.
These things move in cycles. The idealistic youth of a hard pressed generation spawn greedy and self-centered children of privilege and relative ease, but their grandchildren rebel against vain materialism and find their voices again. And so it goes.
