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>>and then applying a few hundred years of compounding interest.

Yeah that is unfortunately how money works. Why do you think countries like USA are so rich, they've been making investments for a few centuries now.

Robbers and looter should pay for opportunity costs, this is how it should work.

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The problem with this logic is it means that the largest ever theft was some hunter-gatherer stealing a spear 100,000 years ago. That's worth almost 10^3000 dollars now, you know!

At some distance in time, returns on capital are no longer adequately approximated by "x%APR". I think this distance in time is at most around 150 years, and even then only in the USA. In most of the world, it's far less than that.

People can rob and loot. A notion of "country" that conflates things separated by hundreds of years is a polite fiction at best.

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