Very Long Quote of the Day

I am re-reading James Michener's Caribbean after 15 years. Michener was discussing the decline of the Spainish Empire and said the following.

Erroneously the king [of Spain] and his advisers believed that the prosperity of a nation rested in its control of bullion; the more gold and silver the galleons brought to Sevilla, the richer the nation would be. This philosophy overlooked one timeless truth: the wealth of a nation derives from the hard work of its citizens at home, the farmers, the leather workers, the carpenters, the shipbuilders and the weavers at their looms; they create the usable goods which measure whether a nation is prospering or not.

In Spain in these critical years, when its entire future hung in the balance, her galleons continued to bring in untold wealth while her artisans and shopkeepers languished. Up the Channel English ships brought little or no gold, but did bring the produce of the new lands and took back to them the surplus goods produced by England's shrewd and industrious citizens. Year by year Spain imported only bullion while the English exported and imported the goods by which men and nations live, and although that year English watchers must have envied the enormous for-tune which Don Alfonso delivered to Madrid, had they been all-wise they would have realized that their small trading ships were bringing to England the more important treasure.

It should also be noted that Spain, in spite of all the wealth from the New World, was deeply in debt to the Fugger banking firm because the King had borrowed vast sums to finance his wars of imperial exspansion. I think there may be a lesson there for those of us in the 21st century United States.