I think about these things more because of the differences I see between the US and Australia, both good and bad. I *do* feel like Australia is somewhat "suffering" from having an attitude of being a colony - there are still a lot of businesses here that are based in England, and things get imported from England when it really makes no sense to do so (except that the people here have that connection; people are still immigrating here from England). I'm guessing there are more UK businesses here than US businesses. Businesses here reach a certain size and they seem to either get sold off or move somewhere else - in part because the relatively smaller population here can only support so much, and there's this trajectory of "growing" that reaches limits here (Rupert Murdoch and Australia's actors head to the US). However, I see that Australia doesn't have a small population because it's mostly desert - after all - Australia *exports food* and that in itself implies it could feed more people. But the economy here seems to have an inferiority complex, and globalization forces mean that rather than the extreme abundance of minerals and energy here getting converted into infrastructure for more population, what's happening is it's getting sold off to other countries. Of course, this is nothing new - the square-rigged Balclutha, sitting in San Francisco Bay at the Maritime Museum ran wheat and timber from California to Australia. The timber went to build mines. The Balclutha returned across the Pacific bringing coal to California, or went on around the world to take it to England. While the US saw itself as a "new nation" in 1776, Australia kept its fortune strongly linked to England until WWII, when the Japanese forced it to stand on its own, as England had its hands full with Hitler. WWII also brought the US and Australia closer, as Australia had an even stronger interest in preventing the Japanese from encroaching. It seems the Vietnam war soured the relationship a bit, as Australians were disgusted with carpet bombing as a strategy.