And yet the Louisiana Purchase guaranteed that the Pioneer System of farming as a capitalist investment of sweat equity in pursuit of capital gain would face no natural boundary until the Pioneer had swept across the continent from ocean to ocean like some kind of slow motion but inexorable wildfire.

And that system, along with its inevitable near genocide of the original nations of North America, is reckoned the better of the two political economies that the Louisiana Purchase helped sustain.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.