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You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collect

You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. The US gets tremendously wealthy off the power and influence it buys with the way it acts on the world stage (as well as unparalleled safety and security). Which is why it grates and/or is mystifying when you complain about that state of affairs. How you distribute the wealth internally is also mystifying, but for different reasons, and largely unrelated to how you get that wealth in the first place.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. Foreigners are always insisting on this to me, but they're never able to come up with concrete examples that are very compelling. The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period, in fact. If Europeans really think it so wonderful to dominate the world stage, they should be very happy for the US to step aside and let Europe take a try. The fact that they aren't happy shows that they're not being honest. >Which is why it grates and/or is mystifying when you complain about that state of affairs. How you distribute the wealth internally is also mystifying, but for different reasons, and largely unrelated to how you get that wealth in the first place. It's very simple. I want the dollars spent defending Europe to be spent here at home. The way I see it, a nation can emphasize one, or maybe two, of the following three: growth, welfare state, military. Post-WW2 US has historically emphasized "growth" and "military". Emphasizing "military" is silly because we barely face any military threats, and we were doing great prior to WW2 with far less military spending. Europe has historically chosen "welfare state". I want the US to switch to emphasizing "growth" and "welfare state", and let the Europeans handle their own continent. The fact that Europe has historically underinvested in growth and military is very much their problem.
- silver_silver 2y ago
  > The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    Well sure, I might as well link you to info on the 2008 crash to demonstrate that the modern US economy is just as broken. Here are some interesting facts from the Wikipedia page you linked: * "The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world" -- i.e. we were doing really well, as I said: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg/1280px-Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Gr... * "with the devastating Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929" -- sounds like it didn't have much to do with a failure to defend Europe * If you're going to try to argue that tariffs worsened the Great Depression -- I'm not advocating tariffs. I didn't vote for Trump btw. I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them. (I don't advocate a gold standard either.) * "Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs." If you think the New Deal ended the depression, which some economists appear to believe, that's basically an argument for the "welfare state" course I'm advocating. * As far as I can tell, literally no one argues for the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance: >The precise causes for the Great Depression are disputed. One set of historians, for example, focuses on non-monetary economic causes. Among these, some regard the Wall Street crash itself as the main cause; others consider that the crash was a mere symptom of more general economic trends of the time, which had already been underway in the late 1920s.[3][8] A contrasting set of views, which rose to prominence in the later part of the 20th century,[9] ascribes a more prominent role to failures of monetary policy. According to those authors, while general economic trends can explain the emergence of the downturn, they fail to account for its severity and longevity; they argue that these were caused by the lack of an adequate response to the crises of liquidity that followed the initial economic shock of 1929 and the subsequent bank failures accompanied by a general collapse of the financial markets.[1] Fun fact: Chaos in Europe might have even been good for the US economy: >According to Christina Romer, the money supply growth caused by huge international gold inflows was a crucial source of the recovery of the United States economy, and that the economy showed little sign of self-correction. The gold inflows were partly due to devaluation of the U.S. dollar and partly due to deterioration of the political situation in Europe.[56] I advocate a Swiss foreign policy for the US. We should have a much stronger default towards neutrality, and stop being so eager to sanction so-called "bad actors" like Russia. That will strengthen the USD as a reserve currency, since central banks won't feel as much need to diversify away from it in order to beat sanctions.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

>You can do both, especially given the latter pays dividends. People moan about the US's domination on the world stage because it obviously benefits you, collectively, as a country, substantially. Foreigners are always insisting on this to me, but they're never able to come up with concrete examples that are very compelling. The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period, in fact. If Europeans really think it so wonderful to dominate the world stage, they should be very happy for the US to step aside and let Europe take a try. The fact that they aren't happy shows that they're not being honest. >Which is why it grates and/or is mystifying when you complain about that state of affairs. How you distribute the wealth internally is also mystifying, but for different reasons, and largely unrelated to how you get that wealth in the first place. It's very simple. I want the dollars spent defending Europe to be spent here at home. The way I see it, a nation can emphasize one, or maybe two, of the following three: growth, welfare state, military. Post-WW2 US has historically emphasized "growth" and "military". Emphasizing "military" is silly because we barely face any military threats, and we were doing great prior to WW2 with far less military spending. Europe has historically chosen "welfare state". I want the US to switch to emphasizing "growth" and "welfare state", and let the Europeans handle their own continent. The fact that Europe has historically underinvested in growth and military is very much their problem.

silver_silver 2y ago
> The US was doing absolutely fine prior to WW2, back when we didn't feel Europe was our problem. Our economy was going like gangbusters during that period in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  Well sure, I might as well link you to info on the 2008 crash to demonstrate that the modern US economy is just as broken. Here are some interesting facts from the Wikipedia page you linked: * "The economic contagion began in 1929 in the United States, the largest economy in the world" -- i.e. we were doing really well, as I said: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg/1280px-Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Gr... * "with the devastating Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929" -- sounds like it didn't have much to do with a failure to defend Europe * If you're going to try to argue that tariffs worsened the Great Depression -- I'm not advocating tariffs. I didn't vote for Trump btw. I hope Europeans take my comments on HN as a wake-up call that even Democrats like me are getting fed up with them. (I don't advocate a gold standard either.) * "Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs." If you think the New Deal ended the depression, which some economists appear to believe, that's basically an argument for the "welfare state" course I'm advocating. * As far as I can tell, literally no one argues for the position you're implying, that the Depression was caused by the lack of a NATO-type alliance: >The precise causes for the Great Depression are disputed. One set of historians, for example, focuses on non-monetary economic causes. Among these, some regard the Wall Street crash itself as the main cause; others consider that the crash was a mere symptom of more general economic trends of the time, which had already been underway in the late 1920s.[3][8] A contrasting set of views, which rose to prominence in the later part of the 20th century,[9] ascribes a more prominent role to failures of monetary policy. According to those authors, while general economic trends can explain the emergence of the downturn, they fail to account for its severity and longevity; they argue that these were caused by the lack of an adequate response to the crises of liquidity that followed the initial economic shock of 1929 and the subsequent bank failures accompanied by a general collapse of the financial markets.[1] Fun fact: Chaos in Europe might have even been good for the US economy: >According to Christina Romer, the money supply growth caused by huge international gold inflows was a crucial source of the recovery of the United States economy, and that the economy showed little sign of self-correction. The gold inflows were partly due to devaluation of the U.S. dollar and partly due to deterioration of the political situation in Europe.[56] I advocate a Swiss foreign policy for the US. We should have a much stronger default towards neutrality, and stop being so eager to sanction so-called "bad actors" like Russia. That will strengthen the USD as a reserve currency, since central banks won't feel as much need to diversify away from it in order to beat sanctions.