From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2001 - 18:19:22 MDT
On 8/21/01 2:21 PM, "Damien Sullivan" <phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 12:34:43PM -0400, Mitchell, Jerry (3337) wrote:
>
>> that was minimal. I recently heard a quote im going to adapt. "Only an
>> intellectual could evade the fact that countries with more freedom tend to
>> be wealthier and more peaceful".
>
> Yeah. But don't overlook America's geographical blessings. A huge resource
> rich land, occupied only by hunter-gatherers, and not many of those when
> smallpox was done with them, whom we were willing to kick around. And then we
> managed to occupy most of it, effectively gaining the defense advantages of
> being an island (Canada being too small to be a threat, and Mexico being too
> backward (except in things such as abolishing slavery -- remember why Texans
> wanted to secede from Mexico! so they could have slaves) without the normal
The timeline is relevant here, and in many cases the people in the Americas
were peaceful as an economic necessity. Many of the vast and diverse
resources taken for granted in the U.S. today were not discovered/exploited
until the 19th century. For the first two centuries of settlement in North
America, the economy was desperately dependent on foreign trade for many
essential goods and materials due to a lack of known domestic resources at
the time. The development of a competent maritime trading tradition in the
U.S. was the result of dire necessity in the early years.
Ironically, some of the biggest imports in early America were things
necessary to effectively wage war, such as gunpowder, gold, and silver (the
latter two leaving the U.S. in a constant currency crisis until the
discovery of vast quantities of these materials in the unpopulated West).
This put the U.S. in a position that is in some ways similar to Japan in the
first half of the 20th century, being forced to trade with countries for the
goods that would allow military opposition to the same countries. However,
unlike Japan, we eventually *did* discover huge domestic resources that
allowed us to engage in warfare with far less risk to our economy. (Japan
of course had to carefully acquire such resources through warfare.)
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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