Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

It is political in nature due to the political processes that have a hold on whether and how it might change.

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...

There's a reason people buy gold. 1kg of Argentinian gold has the same value as 1kg of American gold. And both have the same value as 1kg of gold from any ancient civilization. Big rocks as currency is purely anecdotic.

Of course, if you're in the desert and you're thirsty, a bottle of water has more value to you than all the gold in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that through millennia people has seen gold as something valuable that it's not tied to an economy, a country, an empire or even a culture despite de Incas.

The Spanish price revolution crippled the Spanish state due to the huge inflation driven by New World treasure fleets. Gold is nothing special here.