Stupid Imperialism

 As Trump's imperial project stalls at home, with the National Guard removed from American cities and Republicans beginning to buck him in the House, Trump looks afield to sate his imperial pretensions. As with everything he does, it's stupid - a sort of "Didn't Do The Reading" attempt to mimic the late Gilded Age of McKinley: tariffs and wars of empire.

Richardson notes his rambling, incoherent speech yesterday, and how it ties to his renewed threats against Greenland. This is a great example of Stupid Imperialism. (All imperialism is pretty stupid, but this stuff is...woof.) Trump wants Greenland because it looks huge on a Mercator projection and because he heard they have rare earths. Rare earths are not "rare" but are simply hard to refine. China - who doesn't give a shit about polluting its own air and water - have moved into a monopolistic position on rare earths because they have built infrastructure, not because they own the dirt.

Even with Venezuela, Krugman notes that much of Venezuelan oil wealth is hypothetical to the point of being fictional. It's heavy, bitter crude rather than the light, sweet crude that refines most easily into usable petroleum. 

Let's leave aside the stupidity of Trump saying we "run" Venezuela, when we obviously do not. Let's leave aside the stupidity of tearing apart the NATO alliance to annex Greenland for no meaningful advantage. Yes, the process is stupid and thuggish.

The thing is, the GOAL is stupid, too. The original mercantilism arose from Malthus' insight into the economics of scarcity. If there was a limited amount of a good or resource, it made sense to have a national monopoly on that. Adam Smith and the industrial revolution ended that basic idea - even if it took a century to learn that it was dead. There is no advantage to an empire, which is why - leftist caterwauling to the contrary - America largely did not pursue a true empire. When we did, it largely ended poorly.

The dumbification of America has happened, because one of our two major parties has lobotomized itself to reflect the imbecility of their Orange God.