Live from the Chaos-Monkey Cage: Donald Trump's "Merry Christmas" message claimed, falsely, that Chinese soldiers operate the Panama Canal, and that we should conquer it—along with absorbing Canada & Greenland. Because conquering places and extracting resources from them is how you grow rich. But that has been wrong since at least 1776. Since then, it is increasingly cheaper and more efficient to make something & trade for it than to try to conquer some place and then extract resources from it. Paul Krugman Giveth the Lesson:

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Major takeaways from Paul:

May I say that Trump is still benefiting, maybe more than ever, from media sanewashing? How many Americans, even those who pay attention to the news, know that THIS was the president-elect’s Christmas message?…

And:

Norman Angell’s book… made two main points…. In a world economy with substantial trade… affluence… [has been attained by] small European nations…. An advanced nation can’t extract enough tribute from its vassals to make a significant difference to its overall wealth…

And:

The Axis powers [of WWII} believed that their nations needed empires to thrive…. [But afterwards] the war’s losers did just fine without… empires…. Germany had its Wirtschaftswunder. Japanese economic growth astonished the world for 40 years. Italy… by 1970… GDP per capita was triple its level in 1938…