QOTD - Climate and Economics

The article by  John Ransom at Town Hall is about a European take on climate science (?) in which they admit that it doesn't matter if everything they've been telling us for the last 50 years or so has been wrong or not but the observation at the end is this:

And another thing: Europe controlled North America for longer than there has been the United States.
In all that time they couldn’t make it profitable.

It rather reminds me of P.J. O'Rourke's observation when he went to Egypt to see if he could determine why people in the Middle East were acting crazy.  After getting a drink at the hotel bar and spinning his stool around to view the great pyramid of Giza outside the window he realized that "These people have always been crazy!".

This may have been not entirely fair as up until the mid 600's Egypt had been the Mediterranean's bread basket.

Over the last 2000 years or so there seems to have been only two ways to make a country rich and prosperous:
1. Free trade and low taxes and
2. Looting and pillaging your prosperous neighbors.

Method #1 favors the citizenry. Method #2 favors the ruling classes. In the end method #2 destroys the wealth it attempts to redistribute and reduces everyone to poverty, but while it lasts it produces some really great historical artifacts in the form of palaces which are later converted to museums.