Almighty and impregnable? That's not my thesis -- in fact, you are attributing to me an idea of stasis opposite to the idea of change that I suggested: "The US Empire has three pillars: the Dollar, the Sword, and the American Language (cf. H.L. Mencken, _The American Language_, <http://www.bartleby.com/185/>, 1921). The three pillars support one another. Just as the dollar, made the global reserve currency by the sword, has allowed Washington to run an empire on budget and trade deficits, the American Language, an inheritor of the linguistic estate of the British Empire and its colonial subjects, has allowed Washington to manage the empire on foreign language education deficits, sparing it the costs of establishing a British-style colonial civil service. _As the dollar goes south, however, will fewer people in the world be studying American English, and will Americans be finally compelled to learn a foreign language or two?_" (emphasis added, at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004511.html>); and "In my view, the US power elite have benefited from comparative linguistic advantage in international politics and the culture industry -- producing anything from college education, Hollywood movies, computer software, and scientific discoveries -- due to path dependency, a legacy of the British Empire that the US Empire replaced, and recent victories over the Soviet Union. "Homeland Security" in the United States, however, is changing the cultural terrain, _accelerating international competition_ in the education market, an industry of a considerable size in itself, which also has major implications for labor migration (if students choose to stay) and political hegemony (if students decide to go home, bringing back the dominant ideologies of countries where they study) (emphasis added, <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004621.html>).
>I'm referring to 1945-85. The numbers: "The US Peace Dividend",
>Table A1, pp 55-56, Chapter 3: Macroeconomic Impacts of Disarmament
>and the Peace Dividend in the US Economy. Robert M. Coen and Bert G.
>Hickman. Crunch the numbers, and military spending averaged the
>following per decade:
>
>1940s 18.4%
>1950s 10.2%
>1960s 8.5%
>1970s 5.8%
<snip>
>>proportion of the imperial outlays that ever went into academic
>>think tanks and area studies programs? I'd think that's obviously
>>minuscule compared to military spending.
>
>The GI bill paved the way for the mass university, and Pentagon
>contracts subsidized university research for decades.
The trend from the 1940s to the 1970s shows the proportion of US military spending in the US economy declined, but how is that related to the proposition that Washington has done without "the costs of establishing a British-style colonial civil service" (<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050228/004511.html>), since the military isn't civil service?
Also, the GI bill expanded working-class access to higher education, but workers who went to college because of it didn't all study subjects for and take jobs in managing the US empire.
And what have Pentagon subsidies for university research amounted to in absolute numbers and relative proportions?
How do military and administrative costs of the US empire, measured by proportions of GDP, compare with those of the British and other empires that it replaced? -- Yoshie
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