[lbo-talk] was Is Imperial Liquidation (now metrics of imperialism)

[tfast]

> tfast wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > This seems quite contorted.  At best mistaking consequence for cause
and
> > intention.
>
> Granted -- and I won't try to defend it particularly, but I will suggest
> that imperialist systems are themselves pretty damn contorted, and the
> question of where and how the benefits flow is not really very clear.
> Certainly the dead & wounded in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, & Iraq
> haven't benefited.
>
> Carrol
>
I have always found the imperialism debate with respect to flows of surplus
very odd indeed.  At the end of the Seven Years war the French got to choose
between Quebec (Canada) and Guadalupe.  They choose Guadalupe because it
made something like 200 times what the French were getting from beaver pelts
which were themselves valuable enough to finance the colony of Quebec.  So
what seems so hard for contemporary academics to figure out seems to have
been a straightforward calculation for the powers that be at that time with
the information they had.

As an aside we don't ask how much someone spends on their home invasion
tools and arms when calculating whether or not the bandits were net
beneficiaries.

Travis