Sarah Paine: observation

Transcript context

…Ah. Did Germany have the power under another leader to just hold that whole section of Eurasia? All right. I'm going to flip this whole argument. You're talking about people doing territorial conquest and taking things and butchering enormous numbers of people to get it. You can watch this in real time in Ukraine. This is how it goes — You're butchering a lot of people. You're destroying wealth at an incredibly rapid clip. You can do that but since the Industrial Revolution in the West, there has been a growing consensus that that's probably not the way to do things. We are far better at crafting international institutions, international laws, treaties that we sign on to, the parts that we want to and then we adhere to them. And then that allows us to go all over the world running our little credit card transactions. No one kills us and you can make a lot of wealth doing that. Since the Industrial Revolution, who's making all the money? People who buy into that system. Territorial expansion isn’t the way. It's a real throwback to a pre-Industrial Revolution way of managing your national security. This is how traditional continental empires always did it. The Industrial Revolution with compounding economic growth, offers a completely different alternative, which says we're going to compound our wealth by having rules that we can all adhere to. And then we'll run our commercial transactions that way. Why was Russia eventually so robust in pushing back against the Germans? Despite losing tens of millions of soldiers, the government doesn't collapse like the Tsars did in World War I. And not only that, but a communist country is able to produce really advanced tanks in large and reliable numbers. There are so many mysteries there like why did central planning work? Why didn't the government collapse? Despite the fact that Stalin killed off so many of his people. He would have been hated, right?…

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