through trade.

5-29-2017 Economics is intimately associated with politics, but the one is not the other. The Greek word oikonomia means a household. The English word means management, as in the class "Home Economy". Since management always boils down to pinching pennies, the word comes to mean frugality, and by extension, anything involving money. But the root meaning is still management, not trade. When political motivations take over, nobody knows what anything means any more. The rest of the world does not bother to assess our economic system because it is the same as theirs. They only worry about our political intrusions into the market. For example, the governments of the world have all abandoned real money and use only counterfeit paper money now. The only reason paper money has any value is that the issuing government will accept it in payment of taxes. So the trade value, one currency for another, depends only on how much fake money each country has produced and whether the regime seems close to failure. So it is good to know a few things about economics, but they don't mean much when a tax collector with a gunboat blockades your ports.