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Notes -
Seignorage. The US is able to finance it's colossal debt expenditures at relatively low interest rates because the monetary system based on the dollar allows it to finance a huge current account deficit by printing $100 bills and "selling" them abroad. The Japanese and Germans, two very productive peoples, will accept $100 bills in exchange for their actual industrial goods because they have to, they were forced into the Dollar System as part of their post-war occupation. So everything the government does with that debt, that's the occupation of Germany and Japan in action.
Changing emphasis, it's never been that way
The plebs never shared in the wealth of empire, certainly not equally. Marx details the conditions the Victorian English factory laborer endured, in many ways worse than slavery, 12-16 hour work days, 6 days a week, for starvation wages. Where were their mountains of Indian loot?
Cato the Elder and Younger, among many others, famously argued against imperial aggrandizement because it created inequality in Rome itself, creating a bifurcated society where before relative equality had reined. Cato the Elder passed numerous laws against luxuries which had appeared as Rome had grown rich on plunder; it was not Rome that had grown rich but Rome's upper classes who could afford such luxuries, and Cato's Republican virtue wanted to see that kind of ostentation stamped out, and Rome's elite refocused on good relatively-egalitarian Republican Stoic farm virtues. The plebs made do with bread and circuses, that was what they got from empire.
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