What is the first sin? According to the Bible it
was jealousy. J W Goethe argued rather that it was
sloth. Absolute rest is what people really want, God
explains in the prologue to Faust, and the
devil's job is to stir things up. There is something to
be said for this view. It accounts quite well for the
sin of imperialism. Whole continents have been ruined to
maintain their conquerors in idle luxury.
By the
same token, it is meaningless to speak of an "American
Empire" when Americans incline to sloth less than any
other people in the industrial world. Americans worked a
fifth more hours in 2002 than in 1970, while Europeans
and Japanese worked a fifth fewer, reported the Wall
Street Journal last Thursday, citing a report by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Idle, inherited wealth figures small among America's
rich, whose fortunes mainly derive from long hours and
risk-taking.
Americans work hard because the
world's entrepreneurs become Americans in order to work
hard. In 1998 one-third of the scientific workforce in
Silicon Valley was Asian, according to a 1998 survey by
the Public Policy Institute of California; more
important, Asians headed one-quarter of Silicon Valley
enterprises. No American matches the prototype better
than my Asia Times Online colleague Henry C K Liu, who
inveighs against "US imperialism" from a New York
business address. With all due respect, Henry's choice
of address does more to promote the United States than
his invective does to harm it.
Empires fall, we
are told, when their subjects become fat and lazy. More
accurate would be to say that men build empires
precisely in order to become fat and lazy, that is, to
"wring their bread from the sweat of other men's faces",
as Abraham Lincoln said of the slaveholders.
Of
all the silver wrung from American mines after the
Spanish conquests, not a penny remained in Spain,
observed the historian Fernand Braudel. It went to China
for silk and spices. There it lay like a dragon's hoard
until the 19th century, when China disgorged it to
Britain in exchange for opium.
Loot on the
service of sloth defines the dead empires of the past.
Spain looted the New World to attire hidalgos in Chinese
silk; England conquered India and ravaged China so that
fortune-hunters could come home as gentry; Rome enslaved
half of Europe in the latifundia so that Romans could
eat the free bread ration and watch atrocities in the
Coliseum; the sugar, tobacco and cotton trades denuded
West Africa of a third of its people so that parvenu
planters could pose as aristocrats. Imperial Sparta
impressed its neighbors as helots to maintain its own
population as an aristocratic military caste; imperial
Athens exacted tribute from its maritime dependencies to
support a leisured elite.
The United States
might have turned into an imperial power. It fought a
bloody Civil War to stop the Southern Confederacy from
turning Latin America into a vast slave plantation (Happy birthday, Abe: Pass the blood,
February 10).
Professor Robert E May, I
reported, demonstrated this in The Southern Dream of
a Caribbean Empire (1973). He noted, "The Memphis
Daily Appeal, December 30, 1860, wrote that a slave
'empire' would arise 'from San Diego, on the Pacific
Ocean, thence southward, along the shore line of Mexico
and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus of
Panama; thence South - still South! - along the western
shore line of New Granada and Ecuador, to where the
southern boundary of the latter strikes the ocean;
thence east over the Andes to the head springs of the
Amazon; thence down the mightiest of inland seas,
through the teeming bosom of the broadest and richest
delta in the world, to the Atlantic Ocean'."
Abraham Lincoln sustained a biblical scale of
slaughter to stop men from "wringing their bread from
the sweat of other men's faces". During the past century
the people of the US South have won deserved fame for
industriousness and self-reliance. That is no surprise,
for the Civil War killed off all the Southerners who
preferred to hunt, gamble and duel. As long as talented
fellows like Henry Liu denounce US imperialism from New
York rather than Shanghai, it is pointless to argue that
the United States is an empire, much less that it is
overextended.
In what way might one argue that
the US is "overextended"? The missions that the
administration of President George W Bush has undertaken
strain America's troop strength. America's detractors,
though, should be careful what they wish for. To
eliminate unfriendly regimes and control oil supplies,
the US does not need the sort of occupation force it
maintains in Iraq. Should the US find its troop strength
"overextended", it is likely to revert to the
prescription offered by Victor Davis Hanson, among
others, and use bombers rather than ground troops to
bring to heel recalcitrant regimes.
More likely
than this, Washington might turn away from the
will-o'-the-wisp of regional stability, and reinforce
local allies such as the Kurdish Peshmerga as a
substitute for US forces (Will Iraq survive the Iraqi
resistance?, December 23, 2003). Woe betide the
adversaries of the United States should it choose to
economize on ground troops.
Much is made of
America's balance-of-payments deficit, amounting to more
than 5% of its gross domestic product. Americans enjoy a
higher living standard and a lower savings rate than
otherwise they might because (in part) China sells to
the US at or below cost. But does that speak to
America's weakness, or China's? As long as Chinese
entrepreneurs like Professor Liu prefer the security of
the United States to the vagaries of the Chinese
economic regime, China's labor and currency will remain
cheap.
For that matter, no wealthy Asian I know
puts all his eggs in a local-currency basket; few of
those who did survived the 1997 financial crisis. One
may deplore the fact that Asians lend money to Americans
to buy sport-utility vehicles rather than invest in
their home economies, but it is hard to see what will
cause this to change.
If China manages to keep
its entrepreneurs and scientific talent occupied at home
and produce for the home market rather than for US
shopping malls, a great transformation will occur in the
world economy. Americans then will pay more for Chinese
goods, to be sure, but will have more opportunity to
sell into the Chinese market. How does that undermine
the US economy? US resources would flow toward
investment and away from consumption, which implies
higher economic growth in the medium term.
So
many obstacles lie in China's path toward economic
normality, however, that no one can predict when such a
transformation might occur. For the interim, the United
States will continue to flourish by absorbing the
world's talent and capital, and its detractors will
grind their teeth and curse in vain.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
