The jargon "excellence", "promotion" and "innovations" were not in fashion back in the day. <Genghis had a passion and a genius for recognizing excellent people, and promoting them, and excellent innovations, and spreading them. >
Of course he had a gang and the gang had to be tough, smart and committed to him absolutely. So he'd get those people on side to suppress and conquer and rob the rest.
That's how life was everywhere around the world. Libertarian ideology hadn't been invented. Life was genealogical, tribal, genocidal, based on found wealth and confiscation from agriculturalists.
He was a slaughtering monster who rampaged as far as Turkey and into northern Europe.
Megalomaniacs like him don't have a chance against freely-trading individuals who have mutual self-defence. Unfortunately for democracies, the electorates steal from the productive which ends up more debilitating than a totalitarian dictator conqueror who leaves the productive 90% of their production instead of stealing half of it which is the democratic norm these days.
It's quite conceivable that democracies will vote themselves out of existence as people escape to places where capital and individuals are respected and not robbed by the voting indigent. Not that many such places exist and not for any length of time.
NZ has been on a self-destructive trajectory for decades; gradually, and it was bad back then too, so things are relatively better than then [in many ways, not counting violent crime for example], but vastly worse in comparison with countries which were far behind NZ 40 years ago but are now far ahead. As TJ says, Hong Kong could buy NZ with spare change [which might not be a bad thing - I'd consider selling]
The USA also seems to be voting itself downhill. US$ sliding for a decade. Debts up to the neck. Bureaucratic spending at world record levels. Income at world record levels too, so it's not all bad. But freedom isn't really on the march, as King George II claims. Freedom in the USA is a pale imitation of its previous incarnations [in many respects, though the draft, aka slavery, is no longer in force]. See "A dog to its vomit" for example. fredoneverything.net Fred bemoans many lost attributes of freedom.
India spent half a century voting itself poor, blaming the British of course, but have lately stopped moaning and are taking more responsibility for themselves. It's funny that they moan about the British who gave them all sorts of advantages, not the least of which was English, which opens the door straight into serious global cash flow. China is belatedly trying to catch up on English.
While India was ditching English [which was a stupid move] ramming local lingo down the children's throats, and keeping socialist kleptocracy in charge, China was going Gung Ho on capitalism. So China zoomed ahead.
The son of Indian friends stepped into Google thanks to being an English speaker. A local yokel, even if brilliant, who can only speak Mandarin or Hindi doesn't have a chance. The son of a Peruvian friend stepped straight into Microsoft and is in charge of making the artificial intelligence in Halo.
Google, Microsoft, QUALCOMM and the USA are far more successful than murderous confiscators like Genghis can ever be. Libertarian ideology is what leads to success. To the extent that countries adopt it [which is to a limited extent] they do better.
I doubt that China will catch up because they operate still on Genghis Khan principles. Even now, today, they are planning murderous attack on Taiwan to take by force what they want. They invaded and conquered Tibet. They shoot escapees.
I note that the Indian and Peruvian didn't go to China to work for some great creative company there. Because there aren't any.
They have a chance to get into 450MHz OFDM and succeed globally and make mega umpty$billion, but instead are going to "invent" [meaning steal from QUALCOMM] TD-SCDMA to create a local standard to keep the foreign-devils at bay. Dopey, but that's Genghis Khan "thinking". They think threatening Taiwanese is a much better idea.
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