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Thanks for posting this.

The danger to America, is indeed Imperialism; and that is coming from America; but again, it is not to the rest of the world, that this Imperialism is directed ... rather, it is to America.

Because the "American Imperialism" going on, is known in America as "Government by Judiciary" or what you may refer to as judge-made law.

It is the ignoring of, and the disdain for: our rule of law

our democratic-republic wherein laws are to made by legislative bodies consisting of representives duly elected by the people of the respective States , and of the United States, and

our Constitution.

To wit: the power of making law that is the right of the people, is being stipped away the judicial imperialists, what we call lawyers and their hegemony with politicians, or, if you will, politicians and their hegemony with lawyers; either way, so-called "experts" on the law who prey upon the land.

Thanks for posting this.

The danger to America, is indeed Imperialism; and that is coming from America; but again, it is not to the rest of the world, that this Imperialism is directed ... rather, it is to America.

Because the "American Imperialism" going on, is known in America as "Government by Judiciary" or what you may refer to as judge-made law.

It is the ignoring of, and the disdain for:

- our rule of law,

- our democratic-republic wherein laws are to made by legislative bodies consisting of representives duly elected by the people of the respective States , and of the United States, and

- our Constitution.

To wit: the power of making law that is the right of the people, is being stipped away from the people, by the judicial imperialists --- lawyers and their hegemony with politicians, or, if you will, politicians and their hegemony with lawyers --- either way, so-called "experts" on the law who prey upon the land.

expressed differently, the American people will work and pay taxes that will equal almost one and a half years of the cost of government over the next decade just to maintain and man the American Empire.

The gentleman is using hyperbole. For this statement to be true, our abandonment of any idea of "American Empire" would have to allow us to safely drop all military precautions. Even an isolationist America would need a military.

The cost of "American Empire" is the difference between the cost of an isolationist military and the cost of an imperial military.

It is also possible to make a case that isolationism, which by definition allows threats to arise without interference, will in the long run lead to far greater costs.

For instance, maintaining a strong international military presence during the period after WWI would have at least allowed the US to consider options which might have resulted in the early squashing of the Nazis. This would obviously have been far less expensive, both financially and in lives, than WWII turned out to be.

Since the production of WMD no longer requires the full resources of a large, advanced nation-state, the threat is far more dispersed in the past. It is difficult to see how a more-concentrated military can effectively defend against a more-dispersed threat.

Normally one of the concomittants of an imperial order is that the residents of the entity which controls the empire derive material benefits from the empire. However, in the 20th century the financial and social burdens of the imperial state have disporportionately been borne by the residents of the imperial metropole. This is as true for liberal-capitalist imperial states such as Great Britain as for ideologically driven meta-tyrannies such as the USSR.
Many historians consider that the direct and indirect costs of the British Empire began to exceed the financial benefits during the last quarter of the 19th century. British taxpayers paid for the costs of the financial liabilities of much of the Empire. Even with the costs of the Indian administration being largely finaced by India as the 20th century advanced even innthe case of India the British taxpayer carried the burden for the army modernization program that began in the mid-1930's as well as the costs for the naval base and fortifications of Singapore.
In the case of the USSR, its unfortunate citizens paid in enormous quantities of blood and material sacrifice to erect and maintain the superstructure of the'socialist' empire which flowed from Stalin's duplitious but far seeing foreign policy.
There were selected elite cohorts in government, industry, and finance that derived direct or indirect benefits from the British Empire. These ranged from the priviledged financial position British banking houses obtained by having the Empire as a captive market place to the avialability of administrative positions throughout the empire for the upper middle class. For rank and file Britons there were few direct benefits and the presence of the empire enabled British politicians to engage in diplomatic maneuvering and public relations ploys that helped generate the World War One.
For the American people the putative benefits of being the global hegemon seem even more limited than for their British equivalent. While taxation remains high enough that it is probable that the average wage earner pays 40 to 50% of his/her earnings in one form of taxes or another the job base of the US is being continually eroded through export of both skilled and semi-skilled production and administrative positions to low cost third world countries. At the same time the unspoken agreement among the nation's political elites to allow virtually untrammeled illegal and legal tthird world immigration acts both as a brake on wages and a cause for increased taxation. Average Americans are seeeing their country turned into a third world state, the economic futute for them and their children diminished as the leadership groups of the US become more and more comfortable acting as a transnational managerial elite with less and less real loyalty to the core culture of their nation.
In short for normal Americans the rise to global hegemony means the destruction of their culture and eventual impoverishment as they are reduced to being subjects of a state run by an opportunistic, corrupt olagarchy. To view the future Americans should visit Mexico and see what such a political and social order looks like at first hand. The American hegemon spells the Mexicanization of our nation.

While I think that may have been a genuine hazard in 1953, world events played out into something much stranger than a conventional empire. That's the problem with historical analogy - it's a slave to parallelism. Normally it helps with broad trends and fails in the particular - I suspect that here it helps with the particular and fails in the broad trends.

This sort of empire, if so you can properly term it, has little to do with military domination despite the focus on that provided by recent events in Iraq. I offer for evidence the fact that in a country of over a quarter billion people and a world of over seven billion, we have 1.4 million people in active armed service and the number has been decreasing for half a century. This number clearly does not serve to explain predominance inasmuch as it puts us pretty much in the middle of the pack at best.

Certainly technology is a force multiplier, and the U.S.'s is, at the moment, superior, but not enough superior to explain the predominance of power by itself. It is, moreover, very much a follow-on to civilian technology and not the reverse, which is the typical historical pattern.

What I'm considering right now to explain this anomalous geopolitical position is an oddly disproportionate economic strength and cultural permeation. What may be unique is that, contrary to most classical economic models, the former is not so much the power of the collective and central planning as it is the sum of innumerable small-scale activities accumulating into a rather amorphous whole. Von Mises may have been right. Something like that may be happening culturally, too, or perhaps that is simply a function of the means of cultural permeation the explosion in communications methods afforded it, both from economy and technology. Maybe both.

If so, we are wrong to focus on the military as a proper measure of this sort of "empire," in fact, if military means equates to empire then perhaps the latter term is inappropriate. "Hegemony" seems to be coming back into vogue, but that is a descriptive, not an explanatory, term. We're going to have to think outside the historical box here, because in 1991 the sides of that box got kicked away and the world we ended up looking at is both unexpected and unprecedented.

In short, I don't know what's going on either. Comments?