An American Empire

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.

I don't know if 9/11 fundamentally changed the world for the US. It did for me (I am 68, a college educated Navy vet with an interest in history). I have always said that we need the Marines because there were some people in the world that would shoot me right between the eyes, kill my children and grand children (maybe raping them first) and steal my property just because I am an American.

This didn't concern me too much because, I noticed as I traveled the world, they were there and I was here. There also were two oceans between us, and few of them had Navies.

What changed on 9/11 is that they came after us in our warm, snug offices. Unfortunately, they killed more that 3,000 innocent civilians. The original reports, if you recall. feared that 50,000 persons may have been killed.

My response is to hunt them down, and speakingly quite frankly, kill them. I don't want them brought back to stand trial. This is not a judicial process.

Unfortunately, both for us and the world, they come from a region of the world where there really are no legitimate goverments except for Israel. In my unstudied opinion, I can't predict what will happen when we replace Sadam, but it will send a powerful message to those other countries which have supported and support terrorism and terrorists. It may have been fashionable to pull feathers from the eagle's tail a few years ago, but ,hopefully, it now is a dangerous and perhaps fatal game to play.

If we keep our eye an the goal, and do not waver, we will prevail. So, no it is not an American empire, it is a response to the murder of 3,000 plus persons on our territory by an alien entity.

Gee, it's a tough problem, just maybe it would be best to state it accurately instead of ranting against 'neo-conservatives.

What's not accurate? In their own words in print, on TV and radio neocons talk of dominating the world, remaking the entire middle east and bringing liberal democracy to all the dark corners of the globe and using preemptive wars to make sure no one can challange our status. Somehow in my mind that registers diferently than defending our borders or protecting our shipping. Unless of course one concludes that everywhere in the world one can find an American citizen so there must be American military might there just to ensure their safety. I'm not sure but I do not think most Americans would like to be on the recieving side of these equations. If so then it would not be far fetched to conclude that others might not be too keen on it either but I guess their desires don't count when our "national greatness" and "global hegemony" is at stake.

So, no it is not an American empire, it is a response to the murder of 3,000 plus persons on our territory by an alien entity.

This arguement is not just about 9/11 and Iraq, it goes back at least to the Spainish American War and the projection of force globally, our taking out and putting in rulers in other countries and a large military presence overseas AND it is about the large amounts of blood and tax dollars necessary to sustain these things and the cost of backlash AND the cost to our liberties here at home. No matter how it is calculated the costs of "projecting force" is enormous and the current arguement is do we expand and exasperate the problem or try a different path like the one our founders suggested.

cordially,

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?

"In my unstudied opinion... it will send a powerful message to those other countries which have supported and support terrorism and terrorists. "

You're in good company:
"such presents as would show a friendly liberality should at the same time be made to those who unequivocally manifest intentions to remain friends; and as to those who indicate contrary intentions, the preparations made should immediately look towards them; and it will be a subject for consideration whether, on satisfactory evidence that any tribe means to strike us, we shall not anticipate by giving them the first blow, before matters between us and England are so far advanced as that their troops or subjects should dare to join the Indians against us.
It will make a powerful impression on the Indians, if those who spur them on to war, see them destroyed without yielding them any aid. " Pres. Jefferson to Sec. of War Dearborn August 28, 1807

Our historical policies have been so successful that mid-east tribes on the other side of the world are now more integral to our huge economy than the indians were in Jefferson's presidency.

Honest people familiar with our founding- such elementary events as the Jay treaty, the Quasi-war, Jefferson's Barbary war and the disaster of his embargo- can address the growing difficulties of continuing to follow the principals of relations with other nations that we have for over two hundred years. If costs and benefits of changing our historical policies are discussed honestly we can decide on new ones, or find ways to best make the pro-growth ones work in a crowded world without a frontier.

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

Ha!!! I nor anyone else can prove anything and we never will as we will never have all the evidence BUT as we watch events unfold we can note the clues and produce theories based on accumulated facts.

something much stranger than a conventional empire

Exactly. We influence without always being a force directly on the scene - rule by proxy or satrap as the case may be. If one satrap gets uppity - take him out. The key to all this is our wealth, global reach militarily and high tech capabilities.

Let's face it we, The US spend more on defense than everyone else combined and no one can hope to match it and the same goes for the high tech, it is beyond anyone else's capabilities. France and Germany want the EU to rise to prominence but they can't even afford their domestic socialist obligations so they can't compete militarily. China may be up and coming but they are far down the ladder from us and we are boxing them in with our forces. But the big prize in this whole adventure of ours and the key to everything is the strategic location of Iraq and the strategic natural resources - oil. Iraq is dead center in the middle of the Arab world and the first step. With a huge military force in place there we can dominate the entire region like never before. Right now it takes 6 months or better to build up a large invasion force. Once we have Iraq the problem is solved. With Afghanistan under our control and forces in the Stans of the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe opening up to our bases on top of Iraq and the Balkans we will control cental Asia - the world's oil supply (the balkans being the place for a pipeline to facilitate the supply out of the Black Sea bottleneck). Add to this mix the possibility of taking out the leadership of Syria, Lebanon, Iran and maybe even Saudi Arabia we will truly be a hyper power and total rulers of the world. With strategically placed forces and puppet governments we not only impose our will but our companies get the contracts. As a side note we can eradicate radical Islam, liberalize that religion to a "religion of peace" and force a peace between the Arabs and Israel - peace and safety, a world safe for democracy and all that.

So with England on our side and forces in eastern Europe and all oil purchases remaining in dollars and not in eruos France and Germany and their dream of a powerful EU are smashed. With our forces all over central Asia and in Japan and Korea we have China hemmed in. The result - Pax Americana. New World Order. No longer a distant dream , a very near reality.</P.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.