The Anti-Empire

Daimnation:

The rhetorical phrase "democratic empire" is patently silly. Internally, it's an ideological oxymoron. Externally, Germany and Japan - upon whom we forced democracy - are hardly subject dominions.

I've never understood that criticism either. The US is a weird sort of empire -- one that spends hundreds of billions of dollars of its own money to help other nations while not demanding any financial favors in return. One can, of course, disagree with the usefulness of such a policy but repeatedly calling the US an empire for engaging in this behavior is getting tired.

Comments

[Kevin Baker]

I've had this argument with a Lefty to the point of nausea.

Apparently the position of the Left is that America practices some kind of economic Empire, whereby our Ginormous Corporations go in to foreign nations, suborn the governments of those nations, and force their people to work in sweatshops, (earning 2-10x the national average wage) making cheap products that our disadvantaged classes spend their limited funds on thus keeping them poor. further, our eeeeevil corporations also force those foreign populations to buy American products (with their increased wealth). We also force those nations to sell their natural resources to us, somehow at far below fair-market value!

It's horrible! Horrible!

And somehow the Left never has figured out how those poor, exploited nations generally have rising GDPs and standards of living, while pestilent hellholes like Zimbabwe, with their enlightened Socialist governments (that those same eeeevil American corporations eschew) end up with starving populations and groups of armed thugs roaming around killing people without fear of retribution.

It's a puzzler, all right!