(06-24-2017, 10:08 PM)Galen Wrote: I have considered many different scenarios but the US has a very rigid set of interests who will never give up any of the loot not to mention any special privileges they have gotten. When this happens the system goes on until it breaks. This breakdown is a long term process which in the case of Rome was a century or so but once they got to the point of debasing the silver denarius only a drastic reduction of their welfare-warfare state would have saved them. The Spanish and Ottoman empires similar process took place and they never made the decisions that would have saved them. I expect the US to continue down its current path until that is no longer possible.
When will the 4T be serious beyond any denial? When there is no loot. When survival is itself a privilege to be earned. When identity that comes from consumerism is no longer possible. When corruption kills people. Take a kickback and build yourself a swimming pool in a 3T and perhaps nobody notices. Take a kickback in a 4T and build a swimming pool for yourself, and soldiers in the field find themselves opening empty boxes of provisions or ammo -- and being compelled to surrender.
It's remarkable that you use the Spanish and Ottoman empires as examples and neglect an empire that died about a century ago. I will let you guess which one.
Quote:It is not just military spending but the overall spending of government that causes the problems. There is also the small problem of the ever increasing regulations that strangle economic growth. All these things were present to a much greater degree in the Soviet Union which caused them to go down in seventy-five years. This is a matter of economics and not belief.
So long as the government spending facilitates economic growth (expenditures on basic education, highways, sewers, and public health, things are OK; but spending on show projects, subsidies to the well-off, colonial exercises, and wars for profit ravage a treasury.
Some regulations are benign. If people were reliably good there would be no regulation of business to keep people from doing things that hurt their customers. If you are to bet a million to make a billion (as in oil wildcatting), then do the gambling on your own million. There was much gambling through the financial system about fifteen years ago to about ten years ago, and we know how that ended. People who make the big money have to be regulated just to ensure that they pay the taxes that keep the government going. That's before I discuss such things as mind-altering substances, child labor, and pollution.
Quote:The problems in Illinois are a consequence of overspending and unfunded liabilities such as public employee pensions. This is problem all states have and will eventually manifest in all of them in the fullness of time. I expect as this happens more then the promises of government will be seen as worthless.
Funding of public-employee pensions should be pay-as-you-go. The assumption of any continuation of economic growth that will trivialize fiscal burdens of our time is pure folly. The brick wall that Japan hit in the 1990s is a warning to us all, and that has nothing to do with reckless spending.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.