the colonial experience

Beagles' explication of the Fed sounds approximately correct as far as my understanding of it goes which I admit is not very far. 

There is a lot of conspiracy theory, both on the left and the right about the Fed.  Imagine what that would be like if the Fed, an unelected body, had the power to levy taxes, and of course with that goes the power to decide where the taxes fall.  Our elected government chose a couple years ago to excuse the rich from paying much of their taxes, and now the dems are trying to get some of that money back.  That's democracy I guess.  And shouldn't the body that spends the money also be able to decide how that money is received?  And money taxed does not disappear from circulation, it is immediately spent.


I thought the first line in the fourth paragraph was some kind of quote because it is grey, but I think that is just one of the vagaries of the blogspot editor.  Actually the whole post should be grey instead of black, but I think I understand how that works, kind of like email, when you paste something into it then it wants to follow the font of the pasted item and sometimes it is just to much of a pain in the ass to try to get everything right so you just say fuckit and go along with it, am I right?

Actually I hate that grey font because it is hard to read.  What I am typing right now is a nice black, but once I post it it will all turn to grey.  When I paste something from another post it appears grey and I have to edit it to make it black again.  I usually put it in italics to make it stand out.  One thing I like about email and the blog better than using a type writer is the use of italics and bold, I think it considerably extends my range of expression.


Colonialism was a strange thing.  I think it began with the trading companies wanting an exclusive deal with the local poobahs, who of course were likely to play footsie with other companies so the company (which was sort of an extension of the state) had to put the hammer down and the best way to enforce that was to just take over the country, and the folks at home just loved it when that country became the same color as theirs on a map.  Even if their house isn't any bigger and they aren't any richer or better looking their hearts go thump thump thump when they think their country has defeated another country and now rules it.  Go figure.

But the conqueror eventually discovered that it was awfully expensive to maintain an army in another country, and in fact the wiser expedient was just to buy cotton wherever it was cheaper, and slowly they began to free their subjects.  There would be a big ceremony with bigwigs and flags and bands and the new nation would proudly take its place in the pantheon of nations and fall flat on its face.  Some claimed it was because the colonizer didn't really prepare the country for independence, or that if they had never colonized it in the first place it would be better off.  But the whole thing seems a wash to me, countries in the same area whether they were colonized or not seem to have fared about the same.