Our Laws are Their Laws?

The United States keeps claiming that we are not an empire. This is usually relevant to us having military bases in no fewer than 135 nations other than our own, which certainly sounds like an empire, but the term “empire” could be applied to our expectation that the entire world is subject to our laws.

We recently, for instance, actually indicted a whole bunch of Russians for not complying with our election laws. I found that little move to be high comedy ironic, since our government only marginally obeys our own election laws itself.

Actually, election laws are not the only laws with which our government is only marginally in compliance with, but that’s a different issue.

Dean Baker wrote yesterday, as he does on a regular basis, of the gross impropriety of China’s “wanton violation of the copyrights and patents of U.S. companies,” without mentioning that such copyrights and patents are matters of United States law and that China is not really required to comply with US law.

China has a whole host of laws with which we do not comply on a regular basis, and their economists seldom complain about it.