What About America?

At http://gordon-feil-economics.blogspot.ca/2017/07/the-future-of-asia.html and http://gordon-feil-economics.blogspot.ca/2017/07/the-future-of-europe.html, I looked at trends in the Far East and Europe respectively.

The real geopolitical power in the world today is the USA of course. The United States controls the oceans and also the high atmosphere. In my opinion, this military presence is mainly about protecting international business….maybe not just American business but UK and French as well, seeing as how the UK and France combined control as many large international companies as does the USA.

It isn’t just protection that U.S. forces provide to business. Some of the most innovative technological development occurs inside the U.S. armed forces. It passes into the world of commerce and makes American companies rich.

I don’t foresee the imminent demise of the USA. Many empires lasted longer than the American one.  Some did not.  Nonetheless, projecting offensive power to the periphery of an empire is costly, especially when the cost of defense is so much less than the cost of offense.  This is not the gunboat era. There was a time when a boat with a few dozen men could sail down a river in Africa and breach the defenses of much larger forces --- a hundred killing ten thousand.  No, this is the era when a $50,000 anti-aircraft gun can destroy a hundred million dollar airplane. But the USA has many, many hundreds of millions of those dollars, and some nations do not have many of those fifty thousands.

I think that there will be an increasing variance between the wealth of America’s richer people and the poverty of her poorest. Many workers are slaves by a different name, and I believe that millennials are very vulnerable to that fate.  This has serious implications.