“In a slowed-down, depressed world economy, America’s propensity to consume more than it produces ends up being viewed by the rest of the planet as something positive, even meritorious…
“We behave toward the United States like Keynesian global citizens who are expecting the state to jumpstart the economy. Indeed, according to Keynes, one of the purposes of the state is to support demand through consumption. In his General Theory Keynes has a kind word for the pharaohs who built the pyramids, big spenders who thereby regulated economic activity. Our pyramid is America—kept intact by the work of the entire planet…

“From an economic point of view American society has become the ‘state’ of the entire planet. It often expresses its own hostility to the state, however, an attitude that it puts into practice through efforts to limit the state’s role in the national economy… Paradoxically, the negation of the state in the society has ended up making a ‘state’ of the society. Moreover, it is an entity that has, on the one hand, the negative characteristics that classical or neoclassical economists attribute to the state (namely nonproductivity and financial irresponsibility); and on the other, the positive potential the Keynesian economists concede to the state, namely the capacity to stimulate demand in times of depression.”

—Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: the Breakdown of the American Order, Gallimard, France, 2002, tr.fr. the French for Constable, London, 2004, pp.70-71, (and re-punctuated by rfn for clarity, sense etc)


via sinkers blog.