Well, I don't know if bloggers don't care about these things but we definitely wish we had the profile of the Argentina or the US. Even our portion of the platine region couldn't compete with Argentina for the longest time because mountains cut them off the river. I am somewhat proud of what we've achieved with the cards we were dealt with (and utterly ashamed that we have done so little in terms of rail transport and so on), but we definitely could have used a break.

I suppose the problem with someone that writes for Empire is that they are basically arguing that the US's position is natural and eternal. They don't really build on geography or demographics and hardly talk about society beyond mottos like freedom and innovation and rule of law. It's like the reverse of the argument that the PRC government doesn't really matter for development since China is just returning to it's 'natural place' in the world, with the implication that everything prior to opening to western capital was just holding China back. I'm a historian so I think that's wrong on its face. The US was dealt a good hand, and it's government was ruthlessly efficient in exploiting it. It didn't have to be this way necessarily, and it doesn't have to stay that way forever.