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If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and dip

If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and diplomatic power, there's no comparison. If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!

oblio 5y ago
Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago. The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.
Ericson2314 5y ago
But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU! One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples. A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing. Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that? Workers vote too, so I don't think so.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  I don't know. It seems to me that compared to every other form of state spending (roads, healthcare, etc), military spending is conspicuously poor in terms of return on investment. I think the US is a very weird state - it's probably the most consistently old-school liberal state in the world, it has negligible worker activism, colossal natural resources, and its position as world hegemon gives it all sorts of non-imitable economic advantages. I don't think you can copy the US if you're not the US - the closest in terms of economic policy is the UK, and the UK economy is kind of like a corpse in a bin bag.

oblio 5y ago

Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago. The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.

Ericson2314 5y ago

But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU! One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples. A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing. Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that? Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

pasabagi 5y ago
I don't know. It seems to me that compared to every other form of state spending (roads, healthcare, etc), military spending is conspicuously poor in terms of return on investment. I think the US is a very weird state - it's probably the most consistently old-school liberal state in the world, it has negligible worker activism, colossal natural resources, and its position as world hegemon gives it all sorts of non-imitable economic advantages. I don't think you can copy the US if you're not the US - the closest in terms of economic policy is the UK, and the UK economy is kind of like a corpse in a bin bag.