Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

It's not an unfair assessment, marred by an identity-related political snark coming out of nowhere at about 80%. Spain really did squander its wealth. There are also differences, of course.

Spain was a real monarchy, although much of the power actually lay in the hands of one royal adviser. In case of Spain's 17th century decline, that was Olivares. But the downfall was not only overspending on warfare, but also personal ambitions (leading to infighting), rebellion (Portugal and Catalonia internally, but in colonies as well), and the ad-hoc structure of financing. The monarch was paying the army out of his own pocket. Lending, tax evasion and consequently renewed taxation formed a death spiral, certainly when the imports from South America faltered (a direct consequence of the war).

So if there's a lesson, it's: structural reforms should be made well in advance. But that lesson can be learned elsewhere, too.

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.

I’m not up on my New Spain history, but it was always my impression that imperial Spain was an extractive economy that grew wealthy by acquiring and selling resources, not from technological or cultural innovation.

That seems entirely different from American (US) history to me, which while also host to a ton of resources, utilized them for productive ends. A whole lot of technological and political innovation happened in the US, especially by the mid-late 1800s. I don’t think there was a similar phenomenon in the Spanish empire?

Starts off as a thought provoking comparison and then suddenly becomes a politically driven doomsday prediction.

The insights into the current Dollar hegemony from this article are excellent, but I fail to see the striking similarities.

If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it.

America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe.

The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England.

Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine. In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

[0]https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-...

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economic...

[2]https://fuggerstrasse.eu/en/history.html

If you want to learn more about the creation of the Eurodollar offshore market, highly recommend this podcast episode/video from the Odd Lots pdcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-0EN8_WuvK8

> But the most revealing parallels relate to a different expansionary dynamic—that of money. The key to so much else that happened to both countries was the appearance of what seemed like unlimited wealth but was actually access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere.

If you can’t tell the difference between stealing a bunch of gold in a gold based economy and the US Dollar, then there is not much hope for a decent analysis.

At that time gold was the universal currency. So everyone wanted gold itself, and nobody cared where you got it from or if it was backed by anything, as long as the gold was real. So to summarize, people only cared about the material medium, not the backing of the Spanish government and economy.

With the US Dollar, nobody wants the paper or ink that is the material medium. People care about the US Dollar because of the backing of the United States and its economy. The US Dollar could be paper, plastic or digital bits. People wants what it represents, not its medium. This is exactly opposite to Spanish gold.

Beautifully polymathic. We're not so much watching the harbringers, but into the phase of comparing competing theories of decline. I can't see whether his sympathy for Keynes and Carter are necessary conditions for the rest of his thesis, but the demolition of the domestic market and the installation of an affected managerial class who weren't elites in any meaningful way in both Spain and the present certainly rhyme.

Reading the article and nodding my head along at salient points.

Then...

> The American ruling class found itself compelled to spin bizarre fantasies of Russian “disinformation” to explain away the results of the 2016 election. It can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.

Where the fuck did this come from?

A few bones to pick:

1. It's been known for decades that it's essentially impossible to not run a trade deifict with a reserve currency. It's called the Triffin Dilemma [1];

2. The US Dollar is unlike gold in that you can create it out of thin air at any point. Many gold bugs and Crypto Andys (who are usually the same people) have a problem with this. This isn't actually a problem because the notion of "value" is completely made up anyway;

3. What backs the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the American military. Just look at all the wars the US has been involved in [2];

4. Colonies often turned into a drain on the colonizer's economy even with all th eexploitation (ie outright theft) going on. The costs of holding a colony only go up as the locals (rightly) become increasingly unhappy about the situation.

There's an interesting parallel with the Roman world here. Carthage, for example, used the common system at the time of tribute for its holdings. Rome, on the other hand, used a system of military alliances that tied the colony to Rome in a much more stable way. Some of Rome's colonies were colonies for a thousand years and became so Roman that even when conquered the conquerors became more Roman than the other way around.

5. The US has largely avoided the colony drain problem with economic imperialism. For example, the US now uses child labor in West Africa through intermediaries [3];

6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power. To be cleaer, slavery has never really gone away. It still exists in the form of prison labor (ie convict leasing). You could argue that the reason the US is the most incarcerated nation in the world (ie 4% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is driven by economic exploitation more than anything else.

If you didn't get to the end, there's a bizarre conservative screed at the end:

> [The American ruling class] can no longer tell you what a woman is, and has gone to great lengths to censor and suppress stories—the Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuhan lab leak—it later acknowledged to be true or plausible. The same elite ties itself into absurd knots to deny the fact that it seeks to establish a system of racial quotas in education, government, and business.

So, transphobia, conspiracy theories and complaints about anti-white racism (which is not real, by definition). I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to a comparison between the Spanish and American empires.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

[3]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labo...