"It is the US that asserts a policy of isolation and punishment of China, not vice versa. So long as the US is maintaining a “defense perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant"
Perfectly put. US is hegemon and has been since end of WWII when all competing powers, including those in the victorious side, were so grievously damaged that US became the only country capable of refinancing and rebuilding the rest of the world. US is in decline only in relative terms, as China and India rise from grinding poverty to something like middle income
> So long as the US is maintaining a “defense perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant
The US isn't maintaining a defense perimeter for the sake of it. it does so in partnership with nations from Australia all the way up to Japan.
Okay, but as a citizen I don't care about our military might. I want affordable housing. Affordable healthcare. High speed rail. Better zoning laws. New subway lines. Other countries with less military power have that, why can't we?
Austria strongly relies on the fact that it is located in a "safe" region, where none of its neighbours is likely to ever attack it. Austrian military expenses are very meager.
Aren't the US in a safe region as well? They choose to spend a lot in military to project their force globally, not because they need to protect themselves.
Withdraw the US Navy and watch how fast that evaporates.
Someone has to, or you get piracy. A lot of it. And I don’t mean movies. We have the most to lose from impaired trade, so we pay for it.
We have floating airbases all over the world. As Madeleine Albright said to the president of China, “Jiang Zemin, one of my favorite men, but when you’re not so sweet, I send the Seventh Fleet.”
Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
Not the OP, but I don't understand how you parsed his argument into "I wonder why do you have the perception that half the world would attack the US if they didn't have the largest military force"
There is absolutely nothing insinuating this perception in his comment.
He says that without the US Navy, there would be a lot more piracy on the high seas, and he is likely right. The historical experience from all corners of the world confirms that weakening naval control leads to increase in opportunistic piracy all around. Piracy is one of the oldest organized criminal activities in the world and most civilizations, including the really old ones (like Ancient Egypt) had to deal with it this way or another.
Right. But I’m not saying people are dying to attack the US. They largely don’t care about us. I’m saying that you can play games with, say, Austria, that you can’t with the US. And yes, we will hunt you down. Does that make us bad people? No, it’s the consequence of power. If you don’t use it, someone else will. And the US has done a lot of bad things - but name what other country capable of doing it you would prefer to be in charge. Monaco isn’t an option.
I get your point of view, but I believe in a multipolar world where no single country can set the rules unilaterally.
China has shown us that you can modernize a country and make it a global actor without imposing yourself as a hegemon, and I choose that as a role model.
> China has shown us that you can modernize a country and make it a global actor without imposing yourself as a hegemon, and I choose that as a role model.
Don’t tell China’s neighbors this. The reason they are so friendly with the USA ATM is that China has long aspired to being (and often is) the regional hegemon (and it’s a huge region).
Well why shouldn't China aspire to it? The US are the regional hegemon of the americas anyway, and we all know how much blood was spilled to accomplish that.
Latin americans had to be subjugated with brutal anti-communist dictatorships and the US are the ones who made it happen.
Look at what they're doing to Cuba as a punishment for freeing themselves from Batista, the fascist puppet the US forced as a leader in order to protect their interests there.
China has around 2-3 thousand years of history in trolling its neighbors, so this is just a normal thing, they've never really been a "peaceful" country (but very few countries have). America has only been around for 2-3 hundred years? Oh, it isn't peaceful either.
You could say the same thing about China invading Vietnam because the Vietnamese overthrew their puppet Pol Pot in Cambodia, that guy said to be even worse than Batista because he literally killed a few million people. But then again, the USA and China were allies at the time (the USA tacitly supported Pol Pot as well, as the enemy of their enemy I guess).
There is nothing to believe here, such a world certainly existed before, and will likely soon exist again, but don't rely on it being peaceful.
Competing superpowers, even if avoiding direct confrontation between themselves, will start a lot of proxy wars to push out their adversaries from country X or region Y. See also the entire Cold War 1.0. In multiple places, said war was actually very hot.
Well we have so many wars going on anyway that I start to think the US are a pretty bad hegemon after all, if the goal of hegemony is to prevent conflicts.
So I'll gladly keep some conflict but without Uncle Sam's oppression, thanks.
It is interesting that two people can observe the same situation and come to such different conclusions.
We have so many wars going on precisely because Uncle Sam is slowly losing its hegemonic status - which is not a boolean (true/false), but more of a continuum. If you look at the wars going on, many of those involve US allies vs. allies of smaller powers hostile to the US (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), which is precisely the sort of proxy wars that I was talking about.
IDK where you live, if you're a Latinoamerican, you've had real US oppression - though, let me tell you from the former Eastern Bloc, don't expect Russian or Chinese influence to be any more benign than American one. It is a "choose your poison" situation.
If you are a European, there is no US oppression here. The last European power that was forcibly suppressed by the US was Nazi Germany.
But anyway you can be glad as you wish, because if the current trends continue, you will have a lot more conflicts than today. I am not really sure if "less US influence" will be an upside. Perhaps to you, in your situation, yes.
The US is not the nicest country in the world. It is, however, the global hegemon. China is a major world power, as the home of the oldest semi-continuous civilization in the world. Austria is a bunch of ski slopes and lakes.
My ancestry is Irish and British. We were apes painting ourselves blue when China was building a world. Austria is beautiful. But it hasn’t been a power for 100 years.
Being in control means making enemies of everyone else who wants to be in control. The US is not an innocent bystander, but you could have worse. Don’t forget that.
While the US can always decide to turn inward and stop caring about safety of anything else but their own territory, the resulting harm for the US economy and diplomatic relations would be enormous.
The US took over from the British as the power that protects global trade networks, which means patrolling the seas. The capability and willingness to do so attracted a lot of other developed nations into the US-led political coalition, and contributed to enormous growth of international trade (something like 5-fold since the 1970s?)
Without enough of a Navy, this network will disintegrate, or will be taken over by someone else, much like in the UK-to-US case around the time of WWII. Realistically, the only nation capable of doing so is China and I am not even certain if they wanted to, as their international projects like Belt-and-road are being abandoned.
So how could China develop so much without that huge network of navy imposing their power globally?
Why does China invest in peaceful commercial agreements (like Belt and road, which is still active btw) while the US invests in global military control?
Belt and Road isn't shuttered down yet, but the volume of new projects under its aegis has gone to approximately zero.
China was able to export its goods to the rest of the world using ships. Those ships sailed mostly safe seas (yeah there are exceptions like the Malacca Straits, where pirates still lurk) without any Chinese navy protection, because those seas were made safe by someone else. That is not hard to understand.
If the global trade as a whole is protected by the US Navy, Chinese trade, a subset thereof, is protected as well.
BTW The US does not have global military control. They do have quite a lot of control of the seas, but dry land is a different story. They had to withdraw from Afghanistan after trying to impose their will for 20 years. They didn't succeed in remaking Iraq to their ally either. And, in the steppes of Ukraine, a war has been raging for almost two years by now, with no end in sight - obviously not "in control" of the US, not least because one of the combatants is a major nuclear power and you cannot have any meaningful military control over a major nuclear power.
Japan has all these things. The Tokyo metro area has quite affordable housing by global standards, and housing can be downright cheap in many cities outside Tokyo. Japan has affordable health care and comparatively lenient zoning laws. Japan is famous for its Shinkansen, and there’s a maglev train under construction that will be even faster than existing Shinkansen lines. For local transit Tokyo’s subway and train system continues to improve.
That is precisely the point. All is cheap and nice because there isn't a young population to buy it. Otherwise it would turn expensive because of simple supply and demand.
it's still possible to realize those gains by moving there though, there's plenty of for example Indians who move to Japan straight out of uni (Japanese companies go recruit Indian grads with 3 or 5 year contracts). Don't even need to be an established professional to move there.
The US also has an increasingly geriatric population. Japan has a lead in declining birth rate and increasingly aged population, but the US and western Europe (and China) have the same problem.
The US compensates its declining birth rate by a large influx of immigrants. In comparison, Japan's immigration numbers are tiny: https://data.oecd.org/chart/5StJ
Immigration won't make future generations of Americans larger than the generation before them. We're just losing ground slower than Japan. Much studied and commented on. Tl;dr immigrants have lower birth rate than 100 or 50 years ago.
Finland has 2 high speed trains, and 75km of high speed rail. So, technically yes.
Healthcare is hardly affordable, costs are skyrocketing and meeical staff are overloaded. The system has been overhauled recently, remains to be seen what the effect is.
Cost of living is generally high if you want to live near cities.
Singapore? Does HDB count? Singapore seems to have universal healthcare. Tokyo housing is pretty cheap tbh because you can just live several train stations away and find apartments in the 60k-80k yen/mo range.
Because these countries rely on the US military for protection? All the EU does against Russia. Japan and south-east Asian countries do against China.
Look up how underfunded Germany’s Bundeswehr has been these past few years, how France’s push to build up European defenses is going, how Eastern European countries rely on NATO.
When you get defense for “free” from an overstretched US military, you obviously have more budget to develop your own country.
Unfortunately you are right and here in Central Europe, Putin's invasion of Ukraine caused a lot of anguish. At least initially, plenty of people were afraid that he is going to steamroll Ukraine, and then continue towards the Baltic/Poland, in order to restore the entire imperial zone of influence of the former USSR, or at least as much of it as practical (so, without the former GDR, probably; with AfD in his pocket, he could gain a lot of soft power there anyway).
In that case, if the US decided that they don't really care about a potential nuclear war for the sake of some distant Eastern European countries, we would be caught with our pants down. Only Poland was somewhat prepared.
Many European countries grew fatter and lazier under the American defense umbrella. It was easier to stuff money into popular projects than into guns and soldiers. Only, it turns out, sometimes you really need those guns and soldiers even in the 21st century.
The average people in powerful democracies have a responsibility to avoid the circumstances which historically have led to mass civilian casualties. For USA, the toll of nuclear strikes is an approachable example. Other great powers have a worse record in avoiding malicious mass suffering.
The part relevant to your comment is that the US military now needs to prevent war rather than excel at it. And it has chosen to look as formidable as possible to rational enemies. I think Europe agrees with this, but I don’t know if there are other ways.
Historically, it seemed like the US was very happy with Germany, for example, having a rather low military budget. And even now, how do you think US politics would react if Germany would kick the US military out of Rammstein to deploy their own nukes?
It is privately funded by public SOEs, at least. The BJ-SH line makes enough money, the rest of the HSR lines are running at losses. Maybe they can make money on renting space in train stations like Japanese rail companies do.
> When you get defense for “free” from an overstretched US military, you obviously have more budget to develop your own country.
I have been saying for decades, they need to pay tribute. Never before in history has a super power defended smaller nations and expected nothing in return. The US taxpayer should enjoy some relief from foreign governments who want to be defended.
The US is offering as much protection as the New York mafia offers local shopkeepers - protection from themselves. Sure, we need to pay tribute, but that's because we're vassal states, not because we get anything in return.
They do pay tribute. Slightly obfuscated behind the financial order that comes with that 'protection'. Look up debt levels, or how ownership of strategic assets changed hands in the historical blink of eye since eg Eastern Europe joined NATO / EU.
This would be true if the only way to improve healthcare was to throw more money at it. The US could have the best healthcare system if it chose to spend those 12% on something else than pharma's pockets.
There isn't some simple silver bullet here. While the US ends up subsidizing other industrialized countries for prescription drugs (and that should be stopped), it is a small percentage of overall healthcare costs:
>While prescription drug costs only accounted for 8 percent of total U.S. healthcare spending in 2020, the price of such drugs has risen substantially over the last few decades. ... The U.S. spends twice as much on prescription drugs as other comparatively wealthy nations, on average.
The government doesn’t need to and shouldn’t spend a dime on housing. It’s up to each state to just make it possible to build more homes. If the government can somehow compel that then great. We can fix the housing crisis and grow GDP at the same time.
American healthcare is unusually expensive. We spend more public money as a percentage of GDP than most other developed countries on it. Clearly something else is going on beyond money spent.
I can't say if it's correct or not, but here's an argument [1] that I've heard multiple times:
> Pharmaceutical breakthroughs are financed by the high prices paid by American patients (and backed by abundant venture capital); government-run health systems in Europe then bulk-buy the same drugs for much less. Europe has had some successes—German companies were among those pioneering mrna vaccines—but most of the cutting-edge research in science and technology is done at universities and companies elsewhere.
European drug-makers benefit from those high prices in the US, too. But anyway, I’ve heard that only 11-14% of new drugs are therapeutically important. The rest compete with pre-existing treatments, which I believe is how generic forms bring costs down. I’m ok with universities doing this; bringing costs down does save the lives of poor people.
The US hegemony gives your country massive wealth. US GDP per capita is 30% higher than Germany. Europe is extremely poor compared to the US even when they're not paying for defense. The US has more than enough money to fix its domestic problems. There's just no political will. Nobody votes for the person who wants to fix difficult problems when you can just vote for the guy who points out flaws in the other guy's plan. (Europe is not really any different today - we're just lucky we got the big issues settled a few decades ago before social media gave everyone a voice)
Just look at Americans though - they drive expensive trucks, have huge homes, middle class people can even own boats to require those trucks to drive back and forth with from their homes that have much land they can park a boat on it. Europeans are stuck in tiny apartments in cramped cities and take the train, bus or ride a bike. The US may not be sustainable but it has massively better QoL, I have so many friends who have moved to the US because you can live so much better with the same job.
Your picture may be biased by what you see around you, and it seems to make some assumptions such as big trucks and homes being proxies for true affluence (a lot of what you're describing is funded by debt) or that big trucks and homes equals high QoL. I've lived for many years in both the U.S. and Europe, and the things you mention seem very superficial.
The U.S. has barely any public transportation infrastructure, it's ridiculously car-centric, it has enormous inequality, lacks a functional healthcare system (leading to dystopian situations like "medical bankruptcy"), suffers from insidious pollution (PFOAs are an American invention; meanwhile, a lot of drinking water in the U.S. does not meet requirements for safe levels of lead, and the U.S. is still mostly on fossil fuels), and has a deeply dysfunctional political two-party system that constantly threatens democracy.
A lot of people visiting from the U.S. or other countries marvel at my European country's high quality of life. We have great public healthcare, and a significant social safety net for the disadvantaged. We have a great public transportation infrastructure, a surplus of green energy (no coal), and there's generally little need to own a car for many people, nor a car-obsessed culture. We work less and allow more time for family and friends. Everyone gets 5 weeks of paid vacation every year, by law. Sure, we get paid less, but financial wealth isn't everything. Considering healthcare, we (both individuals and the state) spend a lot less than the U.S. I don't have any data on the sizes of apartments, but plenty of people live in big (perhaps not by American standards) detached houses here.
They are. But they're still expensive(†). My point is that GP says the US can't have nice things because they're spending all their money on the defense of the rest of the developed world and Europe is just rolling in dough to spend on public infrastructure. The US absolutely has money that it can spend on these things if it wanted to, but it doesn't. $60k pickup trucks (the median cost) aren't a thing anywhere else in the world, and in every thread here on EVs it's full of excuses of why these vehicles are ESSENTIAL to the functioning of US society. If all of that money was spent on public infrastructure instead, they could have much nice things.
I totally agree that lots of people are suffering in the US. It's not being spread equally. I totally agree that US politics are completely dysfunctional. I agree that that is the problem. I'm just refuting GPs argument that "it's because we're sending money overseas". It's because you're misallocating money locally.
GP is saying Europe can have these things because the the US is defending them. I'm saying the US has more than enough money to do these things, if they allocated it the same as Europe does (even after removing military spending)
(†) Debt, sure, but Japan's national debt is 200% of GDP and people are touting them in this thread as an example of how you can have your cake and eat it too.
> Nobody votes for the person who wants to fix difficult problems when you can just vote for the guy who points out flaws in the other guy's plan
This is the major flaw with democracy and the reason it’s a moral imperative for the US to spread democracy. It’s easy for a small group (in reality, many disparate small groups) to manipulate a large population.
While technically it’s true the people of the US could fix this with voting, in reality it’s an insane way to operate. Our democracy was originally founded with restrictions on who could vote as well at a time when we had much stronger cultural bonds. Limiting who could vote mixed in with a healthy culture is necessary for democracy to work - otherwise it is exploited.
We need and deserve leaders who want to do the best for their people. Representative democracy allows for parasites to prevent this while placing the onus on the voter for their woes, knowing full well the voter will never be able to organize in a meaningful capacity because the population is too large and diverse. If the answer to our problems is always “get out and vote better”, nothing is ever going to get done and anyone pushing that idea is either ignorant or malicious.
> When you get defense for “free” from an overstretched US military, you obviously have more budget to develop your own country.
Don't forget that is not "free", the US has benefited from a lot of perks due to the position they're in.
But it is true sovereign countries should take care of their defenses beyond what the US has to offer, but that will also come at the cost of the US.
You can't have the cake and eat it at the same time - which is what some people seem to be forgetting among all of those internal politics complaints, and the mixing of the US geoplitics with internal politics.
Because you can't be the "leader of the free world" and get all the benefits from it, while you cherry pick what it entails. Now you might argue that you don't see the benefits of that position, which is fair, but a lot is going on more than just military bases in Europe.
And the world will carry on, and those voids left by the US will be filled. China is very happy to fill those empty spaces.
Yup. I think the US will suffer brain drain as skilled professionals realize they can move abroad for a better QOL. I'm not talking about FIRE in Thailand but moving to a Western European country or East Asian country where there is lots of developed infrastructure and expat groups (e.g. immigrant communities)
That is nowhere near happening yet. The USA still benefits from brain drain from those countries to the USA for some reason. Denmark, for example, just produces too many computer scientists to utilize locally, so lots of them wind up in the US.
I’m not sure about that. If I were a single-issue voter it would be on the potential for competence, and I see myself as a vanishing minority.
For example, going into the 2016 election, more Americans claimed to value honesty highest among the qualities of candidates. That did not signal to the future President what trait he should pursue to gain support for re-election. He stood to claim credit for winning a War on Coronavirus by following career policy people (the safest thing, rely on their competence), but chose to vilify them instead. I know CEOs, and none would have been so incompetent.
When it comes to the legislative branch, the way it apparently works is: the process of forming regulations bestows congresspeople with insider-trading knowledge. Some congresspeople choose to believe wingnut lobbyists whose industries depend on subsidies, and then privately hedge. Others take the regulatory lessons back to their district and essentially spread the insider-trading knowledge around. This is their only job —- they don’t make “hard choices” —- yet Americans choose ten qualities before competence.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadPerfectly put. US is hegemon and has been since end of WWII when all competing powers, including those in the victorious side, were so grievously damaged that US became the only country capable of refinancing and rebuilding the rest of the world. US is in decline only in relative terms, as China and India rise from grinding poverty to something like middle income
The US isn't maintaining a defense perimeter for the sake of it. it does so in partnership with nations from Australia all the way up to Japan.
Someone has to, or you get piracy. A lot of it. And I don’t mean movies. We have the most to lose from impaired trade, so we pay for it.
We have floating airbases all over the world. As Madeleine Albright said to the president of China, “Jiang Zemin, one of my favorite men, but when you’re not so sweet, I send the Seventh Fleet.”
Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
Why doesn't that happen to Austria, for example, or China?
Perhaps "fucking" with the world is what caused the US to be considered an enemy by so many countries.
Almost like the more they impose their force globally, the more other countries feel the need to resist it.
There is absolutely nothing insinuating this perception in his comment.
He says that without the US Navy, there would be a lot more piracy on the high seas, and he is likely right. The historical experience from all corners of the world confirms that weakening naval control leads to increase in opportunistic piracy all around. Piracy is one of the oldest organized criminal activities in the world and most civilizations, including the really old ones (like Ancient Egypt) had to deal with it this way or another.
From OP:
> Nukes mean that no nation-state will attack us openly. The Navy means that fucking with the US is a personal death sentence.
China has shown us that you can modernize a country and make it a global actor without imposing yourself as a hegemon, and I choose that as a role model.
Don’t tell China’s neighbors this. The reason they are so friendly with the USA ATM is that China has long aspired to being (and often is) the regional hegemon (and it’s a huge region).
Latin americans had to be subjugated with brutal anti-communist dictatorships and the US are the ones who made it happen.
Look at what they're doing to Cuba as a punishment for freeing themselves from Batista, the fascist puppet the US forced as a leader in order to protect their interests there.
You could say the same thing about China invading Vietnam because the Vietnamese overthrew their puppet Pol Pot in Cambodia, that guy said to be even worse than Batista because he literally killed a few million people. But then again, the USA and China were allies at the time (the USA tacitly supported Pol Pot as well, as the enemy of their enemy I guess).
There is nothing to believe here, such a world certainly existed before, and will likely soon exist again, but don't rely on it being peaceful.
Competing superpowers, even if avoiding direct confrontation between themselves, will start a lot of proxy wars to push out their adversaries from country X or region Y. See also the entire Cold War 1.0. In multiple places, said war was actually very hot.
So I'll gladly keep some conflict but without Uncle Sam's oppression, thanks.
We have so many wars going on precisely because Uncle Sam is slowly losing its hegemonic status - which is not a boolean (true/false), but more of a continuum. If you look at the wars going on, many of those involve US allies vs. allies of smaller powers hostile to the US (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), which is precisely the sort of proxy wars that I was talking about.
IDK where you live, if you're a Latinoamerican, you've had real US oppression - though, let me tell you from the former Eastern Bloc, don't expect Russian or Chinese influence to be any more benign than American one. It is a "choose your poison" situation.
If you are a European, there is no US oppression here. The last European power that was forcibly suppressed by the US was Nazi Germany.
But anyway you can be glad as you wish, because if the current trends continue, you will have a lot more conflicts than today. I am not really sure if "less US influence" will be an upside. Perhaps to you, in your situation, yes.
My ancestry is Irish and British. We were apes painting ourselves blue when China was building a world. Austria is beautiful. But it hasn’t been a power for 100 years.
Being in control means making enemies of everyone else who wants to be in control. The US is not an innocent bystander, but you could have worse. Don’t forget that.
The US took over from the British as the power that protects global trade networks, which means patrolling the seas. The capability and willingness to do so attracted a lot of other developed nations into the US-led political coalition, and contributed to enormous growth of international trade (something like 5-fold since the 1970s?)
Without enough of a Navy, this network will disintegrate, or will be taken over by someone else, much like in the UK-to-US case around the time of WWII. Realistically, the only nation capable of doing so is China and I am not even certain if they wanted to, as their international projects like Belt-and-road are being abandoned.
Why does China invest in peaceful commercial agreements (like Belt and road, which is still active btw) while the US invests in global military control?
China was able to export its goods to the rest of the world using ships. Those ships sailed mostly safe seas (yeah there are exceptions like the Malacca Straits, where pirates still lurk) without any Chinese navy protection, because those seas were made safe by someone else. That is not hard to understand.
If the global trade as a whole is protected by the US Navy, Chinese trade, a subset thereof, is protected as well.
BTW The US does not have global military control. They do have quite a lot of control of the seas, but dry land is a different story. They had to withdraw from Afghanistan after trying to impose their will for 20 years. They didn't succeed in remaking Iraq to their ally either. And, in the steppes of Ukraine, a war has been raging for almost two years by now, with no end in sight - obviously not "in control" of the US, not least because one of the combatants is a major nuclear power and you cannot have any meaningful military control over a major nuclear power.
https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Among-Immigrants-and-Native...
Japan has started to encourage immigration, but probably too little, too late.
Almost every country in Asia has a declining birth rate.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171367/apac-total-ferti...
Healthcare is hardly affordable, costs are skyrocketing and meeical staff are overloaded. The system has been overhauled recently, remains to be seen what the effect is.
Cost of living is generally high if you want to live near cities.
Subway lines only in the capital.
Look up how underfunded Germany’s Bundeswehr has been these past few years, how France’s push to build up European defenses is going, how Eastern European countries rely on NATO.
When you get defense for “free” from an overstretched US military, you obviously have more budget to develop your own country.
In that case, if the US decided that they don't really care about a potential nuclear war for the sake of some distant Eastern European countries, we would be caught with our pants down. Only Poland was somewhat prepared.
Many European countries grew fatter and lazier under the American defense umbrella. It was easier to stuff money into popular projects than into guns and soldiers. Only, it turns out, sometimes you really need those guns and soldiers even in the 21st century.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579988
The average people in powerful democracies have a responsibility to avoid the circumstances which historically have led to mass civilian casualties. For USA, the toll of nuclear strikes is an approachable example. Other great powers have a worse record in avoiding malicious mass suffering.
The part relevant to your comment is that the US military now needs to prevent war rather than excel at it. And it has chosen to look as formidable as possible to rational enemies. I think Europe agrees with this, but I don’t know if there are other ways.
I have been saying for decades, they need to pay tribute. Never before in history has a super power defended smaller nations and expected nothing in return. The US taxpayer should enjoy some relief from foreign governments who want to be defended.
> I want affordable housing. Affordable healthcare. High speed rail. Better zoning laws. New subway lines.
Are you saying we only need 12% of the budget to fix these things? Note that coincidentally medicare is already accounting for ~12% of the total.
Say the military budget goes to zero (which it can't), and we spend half of that on medicare (it would be 18%). Will it fix the problem?
I think the problem is much deeper than wasting this 12%.
>While prescription drug costs only accounted for 8 percent of total U.S. healthcare spending in 2020, the price of such drugs has risen substantially over the last few decades. ... The U.S. spends twice as much on prescription drugs as other comparatively wealthy nations, on average.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2022/11/how-much-does-the-united-s...
> Pharmaceutical breakthroughs are financed by the high prices paid by American patients (and backed by abundant venture capital); government-run health systems in Europe then bulk-buy the same drugs for much less. Europe has had some successes—German companies were among those pioneering mrna vaccines—but most of the cutting-edge research in science and technology is done at universities and companies elsewhere.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...
The U.S. has barely any public transportation infrastructure, it's ridiculously car-centric, it has enormous inequality, lacks a functional healthcare system (leading to dystopian situations like "medical bankruptcy"), suffers from insidious pollution (PFOAs are an American invention; meanwhile, a lot of drinking water in the U.S. does not meet requirements for safe levels of lead, and the U.S. is still mostly on fossil fuels), and has a deeply dysfunctional political two-party system that constantly threatens democracy.
A lot of people visiting from the U.S. or other countries marvel at my European country's high quality of life. We have great public healthcare, and a significant social safety net for the disadvantaged. We have a great public transportation infrastructure, a surplus of green energy (no coal), and there's generally little need to own a car for many people, nor a car-obsessed culture. We work less and allow more time for family and friends. Everyone gets 5 weeks of paid vacation every year, by law. Sure, we get paid less, but financial wealth isn't everything. Considering healthcare, we (both individuals and the state) spend a lot less than the U.S. I don't have any data on the sizes of apartments, but plenty of people live in big (perhaps not by American standards) detached houses here.
They are. But they're still expensive(†). My point is that GP says the US can't have nice things because they're spending all their money on the defense of the rest of the developed world and Europe is just rolling in dough to spend on public infrastructure. The US absolutely has money that it can spend on these things if it wanted to, but it doesn't. $60k pickup trucks (the median cost) aren't a thing anywhere else in the world, and in every thread here on EVs it's full of excuses of why these vehicles are ESSENTIAL to the functioning of US society. If all of that money was spent on public infrastructure instead, they could have much nice things.
I totally agree that lots of people are suffering in the US. It's not being spread equally. I totally agree that US politics are completely dysfunctional. I agree that that is the problem. I'm just refuting GPs argument that "it's because we're sending money overseas". It's because you're misallocating money locally.
GP is saying Europe can have these things because the the US is defending them. I'm saying the US has more than enough money to do these things, if they allocated it the same as Europe does (even after removing military spending)
(†) Debt, sure, but Japan's national debt is 200% of GDP and people are touting them in this thread as an example of how you can have your cake and eat it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Off topic: China has done a great job pulling half a billion people out of poverty and it shows.
This is the major flaw with democracy and the reason it’s a moral imperative for the US to spread democracy. It’s easy for a small group (in reality, many disparate small groups) to manipulate a large population.
While technically it’s true the people of the US could fix this with voting, in reality it’s an insane way to operate. Our democracy was originally founded with restrictions on who could vote as well at a time when we had much stronger cultural bonds. Limiting who could vote mixed in with a healthy culture is necessary for democracy to work - otherwise it is exploited.
We need and deserve leaders who want to do the best for their people. Representative democracy allows for parasites to prevent this while placing the onus on the voter for their woes, knowing full well the voter will never be able to organize in a meaningful capacity because the population is too large and diverse. If the answer to our problems is always “get out and vote better”, nothing is ever going to get done and anyone pushing that idea is either ignorant or malicious.
Don't forget that is not "free", the US has benefited from a lot of perks due to the position they're in.
But it is true sovereign countries should take care of their defenses beyond what the US has to offer, but that will also come at the cost of the US.
You can't have the cake and eat it at the same time - which is what some people seem to be forgetting among all of those internal politics complaints, and the mixing of the US geoplitics with internal politics.
Because you can't be the "leader of the free world" and get all the benefits from it, while you cherry pick what it entails. Now you might argue that you don't see the benefits of that position, which is fair, but a lot is going on more than just military bases in Europe.
And the world will carry on, and those voids left by the US will be filled. China is very happy to fill those empty spaces.
For example, going into the 2016 election, more Americans claimed to value honesty highest among the qualities of candidates. That did not signal to the future President what trait he should pursue to gain support for re-election. He stood to claim credit for winning a War on Coronavirus by following career policy people (the safest thing, rely on their competence), but chose to vilify them instead. I know CEOs, and none would have been so incompetent.
When it comes to the legislative branch, the way it apparently works is: the process of forming regulations bestows congresspeople with insider-trading knowledge. Some congresspeople choose to believe wingnut lobbyists whose industries depend on subsidies, and then privately hedge. Others take the regulatory lessons back to their district and essentially spread the insider-trading knowledge around. This is their only job —- they don’t make “hard choices” —- yet Americans choose ten qualities before competence.