Have you read the book "Dreadnought"? I think you'd really enjoy it; it's by RKM and it's subtitled: "England, Germany and the coming of the Great War." It's o

Have you read the book "Dreadnought"? I think you'd really enjoy it; it's by RKM and it's subtitled: "England, Germany and the coming of the Great War." It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. What is interesting to me, though, is how Great Britain was an amazingly capitalist power. I never really realized the extent to which the entire empire -- which never really made that much money for the government -- was just a thin candy shell around British commerce, which made England the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. It's staggering to see, during the Naval Arms Race, how tiny england, with half the population of massively industrialized Germany, dedicated itself to laying 2 keels to every 1 that Germany laid down. I agree with your sentiment that the socialist countries forced a degree of socialism on the more independent, capitalist nations. Look at Great Britain! It causes physical pain to look back and see what the taxation picture was before the world wars. But. There are other emergences of socialism that are called for and accepted because they're the best workable way of providing something that's necessary, either for business reasons or the demands of human liberty. Sure, maybe someone can figure out a way to have all private toll roads, and make that work without ridiculous regulation and abuse ... in the meantime, we have to move goods. We're going to socialize that, fully realizing how hard de-socializing is, because we have crap to get done. On the other end of the spectrum, child labor laws. I'm of one accord with the thrust of an observation made by Paul Graham -- 'maybe child labor laws are saving kids from something they don't need saving from; maybe 17-year-olds could do something.' Bravo! Until we can figure out a way of carefully instilling a culture of real productivity into youth, however, we had an existing problem of four-year-olds working with machinery that sometimes ate their fingers. At the moment, health in the States is a joke compared to the rest of the first world. Currently, the system of incentives we have pressures people to sacrifice their precious health for a few extra short-term dollars. Because of the economic circumstances of their parents, children will die in this country that would have grown to adulthood in the rest of the first world. The incentives are set up to encourage reckless behavior that will eventually result in a crushing burden of debt, so people will be trapped in poverty who could have escaped in other countries. These are massive, existing problems in the US. Now, you can't blame a country for doing what the rest of the first world has done, which is to say: let's fix the problem. It seems unreasonable to expect any other behavior.