He plays a lengthy riff on the term "liberal," as in the "liberal view," or the liberalism that, for "200 years, was the main engine of American expansion".
Private consumption has been the main engine of the expansion, amid strong job creation, and business investment continues to recover strongly, supported by diminishing uncertainty," the OECD said in its latest economic outlook report.
Walter Johnson's "River of Dark Dreams" shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.
She noted that American colleges had served as "both the emblem and the engine of the expansion of citizenship, equality and opportunity — to blacks, women, Jews, immigrants, and others who would have been subjected to quotas or excluded altogether in an earlier era".
Rome's great strength, the ancient historians argue (and modern historians seem to agree), stemmed from political institutions that turned internal divisions into an engine of external expansion, that allowed for popular participation and executive decision, and that concentrated strategic decision making in a powerful Senate composed of the leading men of Rome.
Nearly 39 million mainlanders left China on overseas trips in the first half of 2012, about double the number five years ago and evidence that a powerful consumer force — envisaged by the top leadership as the engine of economic expansion in a generation to come — may be bulking up faster than thought.
But the chief engine of that expansion was the US trade deficit.
The coming wallop to small businesses, top earners and capital formation, the engines of the expansion, is an almost certain recession trigger unless the 2008 elections lay the groundwork for suspending (better yet, rescinding) Washington's standard tax-and-spend budgeting procedures.
The economy and human population would ideally stabilize at environmentally sustainable levels rather than be engines of unrelenting expansion, and government would award subsidies for public infrastructure and the spread of "green energy" as an alternative to "dirty" fossil fuels.
The fear is that a broad decline in home prices or a sharp drop in several boom markets will also deal a blow to consumer spending, the engine of the current expansion.
