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You make some very good points.

The major difference between China and the U.S.A. is that we never stop at frontiers, we just plow on ahead. China did stop once it grew to a certain size and then hesitated to explore overseas even though possessing a sizable navy. The China of the Ming Dynasty, and the Ottoman Empire in what is present day Turkey, were the superpowers of circa 1500 AD.

If anyone then had said that by 2000 AD, millions of people world-wide would live in wealth because of an industrial revolution centered in what was then a rustic Europe and a wilderness in North America, that person would have been considered insane.

We’ve come a long way, and I don’t for a moment believe it is over.

However this election is very important, because the wrong person as President will destroy this nation and set us back. Our military for the past twenty years or so has been used to police the world and maintain security for international commercial interests. This is called Globalism. Romney and the Bush coterie support it, and it is bankrupting the nation. These elitists don’t give a damn about anyone’s God-given rights. All they care about is keeping themselves in power and lucre.

Some historical perspective
From a long-term perspective, the prospect of China becoming the world’s largest economy, and India the third largest, within the next 10-15 years, represents a return to the order which has prevailed throughout most of human history. According to calculations by Angus Maddison5, from at least the beginning of the common era until the early 19th century, China and India accounted for around half of global GDP (see Chart 1). For much of this period China and India were intact polities, had the world’s largest populations and were technological leaders. Sources: Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD Development Centre, 2001; IMF, World Economic Outlook Database, 2005. As Jared Diamond notes, “until around AD 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe”6. Chinese inventions before or during this period included the wheelbarrow, gunpowder, matches, cast iron, porcelain, magnetic compasses, sternpost rudders, paper, printing, paper money and a meritocratic civil service.7 Indian inventions from this period include the decimal system (and the concept of zero), the water-wheel, cotton-ginning, cloth dyes, brass and the extraction of crystalline sugar from cane8. The decline in the relative importance of China and India between the early 18th and late 20th centuries resulted from, inter alia, the industrial revolution in Western Europe; the formation and rapid expansion of the United States; China’s retreat from engagement with the global economy beginning during the Ming Dynasty9 and subsequent decay under the Qing dynasty; the impact of colonial rule on India, and ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and ‘unequal treaties’ on China; nearly fifty years of warfare and social disorder in China in the first half of the 20th century followed by another quarter-century of chaos and misrule under Mao Zedong; and forty years of growth-stultifying Nehruvian socialism in India from independence until the financial crisis of 1991.