

Americans are wallowing in decline - cwan
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/24/wallowing_in_decline

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gamble
America has the foreign policy and military structure of an imperial power,
but lacks a direct mechanism to collect the tribute that historically
supported empires. Instead, the system depends on the US possessing relative
economic advantage in a free-trade system to create prosperity which can then
be taxed, underwriting the enormous military budget. That system has been
broken since the late 60s; globalization and radical antitax conservatism
eliminated the financial foundation required to maintain such a vast military.
In the end, a state that can't pay for its military ceases to have the ability
to act as a hegemon.

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sfgary1
I generally agree with you that there is no direct evidence of "tribute
collection." However, if you look at the most recent example of Iraq, we could
make the case that the U.S. has placed permanently placed its military in a
country with a lot of oil reserves and could assure itself of cheap plentiful
supply from not only Iraq but from the region. Putting my conspiracy theory
hat on I would say that the Iraq war was not about WMDs but using it as a
excuse to go after the oil reserves.

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goalieca
Well, I don't think China is living sustainably either. I see it more likely
that south america and europe strengthen while the US wanes.

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dasil003
No country is perfect, and the US is still in great shape. But I think the
basic issue that Americans are fat and entitled is a serious cultural hurdle
that we need to get over. People need to put this into perspective that our
global dominance and unprecedented prosperity of the last 60 years was
basically served up on a platter by the worldwide industrial destruction of
WWII. If we can just accept that we are not in fact smarter or better than any
other country, and that sooner or later we _will_ have to compete head on with
hungrier nations like China and India, and we stop looking for answers with
clever accounting and protectionist policies, or burying our heads in the sand
and scapegoating illegal immigrants; if we can come to terms with all that
culturally, then I think we will be able to stay in better shape than most
countries in the world for the foreseeable future, but that's a big if.

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iouytgyhjk
"United States deployed force .... has done so in support of "worthy causes
all over the planet," whether stopping genocide or promoting democracy in the
Middle East.

Was this supposed to be ironic? The US like every other country has deployed
force to get what it wants, to stop an enemy or to please it's own voters.
Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada (in fact most of central america), Cuba, Iraq
(1 and 2), Afghanistan (1 and 2) were not about promoting democracy.

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jbarham
FYI, Korea is divided into two countries, North Korea and South Korea. I'll
leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one is a dynastic
totalitarian Stalinist state in which millions of its citizens have starved in
the past 20 years, and which one has an ongoing US military presence.

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gamble
South Korea was a often-brutal military dictatorship until the late 1980s. The
US was there to stop Communism, not foster democracy. If South Korea is a
better place today, it's because of the Koreans themselves far more than the
US.

~~~
jbarham
> If South Korea is a better place today, it's because of the Koreans
> themselves far more than the US.

Agreed. Which makes the inability of the North Koreans to escape from under
their repressive regime all the more tragic.

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lotusleaf1987
Warren Buffett has a good quote saying something like "when people are scared
you should be brave and when people are brave you should be scared" and then
elaborated by saying something like "It's never as bad, or as good, as people
think, it's usually somewhere in the middle." Basically, Buffett says don't
believe the hype.

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thisisnotmyname
The quote is: "Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are
their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in
equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when
others are fearful."

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett>

~~~
lotusleaf1987
Yes that's the quote I was thinking of, I think he also said it during a talk
with Bill Gates on CNBC during 'Keeping America Great' special:
<http://classic.cnbc.com/id/33604479>

