The America empire may well collapse leaving the world to burn. The left has continually burdened America with taxes and regulations designed to burden business and dull the intelligence of the populace. America has an Energy Department that seeks to increase energy cost and reduce energy use rather than increase energy production and reduce energy prices. Yes, collapse is possible.
Ping
Ferguson’s a typical anti-American Brit, but so are most of our leaders in business, government and academia. An effort to bring down freight fuel prices and foreign product prices got out of hand more than a couple of years ago. The globalist scheme of debts for foreign products wasn’t meant to be sustainable. Now there are rumors circulating among favored constituents to the effect that the economy will be continued and managed on a much smaller scale to exclude a large part of the population.
Get ready.
“outdated theory of history”
If you examine this phrase, you find a concept that history be constantly “updated” - for what? - to fit the political concept of the day?
History is history - the only updating it needs is to add today’s events to it, not change the view of the past!
“fiscal deficits and military overstretch”
Two more errors.
There woild be no fiscal deficits if the Liberal/Democrat/Socialists would get their greasy political mitts off our economy and let private enterprise start creating wealth again!
And we are not overstretched militarily. We have a Communist idiot in the White House lying through his teeth every day to decreasingly gullible citizens.
That’s where we’re “overstretched”.
Niall Ferguson bump for later...........
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I can't think of a single occurrence of a sudden collapse of an empire. The post-WWI redrawing of the map of Europe by the victorious (and severely bloodied) British and French eliminated the Austrian-Hungarian Empire; the modern German state put together by Otto von wasn't an empire, merely a late-to-the-party nation-state. Rome started to fall apart in the 3rd century, and the western half didn't finally collapse until early in the 5th century; whereas the eastern half went on a thousand years more. The continuum of Elam-Persia-Parthia was around for thousands of years, and one could argue that it has been revived again. Thanks SmokingJoe....anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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Am I missing something? When did America become an empire?
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana
I think the Limey is on to something. History does show that civilizations collapse, and the old saying is “All good things come to an end.” Inevitably, the United States will not always be here. Will that be the end of civilization? Maybe. What will come afterward? That depends on the situation of the breakdown. Rome fell to migrations of barbarians, after being divided and having frequent internal wars that weakened it militarily; the British empire disintegrated as broken, war-exhausted Britain retreated into itself to become the lame socialist nanny-state it is now; the Soviet Union fell to pieces after its constituent peoples realized the Russians did not have the will to hold them in a brutal thralldom. All these led to different things- and however the US comes to an end will have much to do with how it turns out. About the only thing really separating us from previous empires is that we do pick our leaders, and as 2008 shows, we do not always pick wisely nor do we have much to pick from.
For my part, I expect the US will probably fragment, as the differences between conservatives and liberals deepen to the point of irreconcilability. As our own Civil War shows, we can compromise only so far before people turn to gunpowder and steel to settle their differences, especially where one side or the other is determined to have its way at all costs. I’m not sure we are there yet- Rome’s period of peace ended in 192 with the assassination of Commodus, and the western Roman empire was dismembered in 476 AD. (The eastern Roman empire persisted until 1453 AD before falling prey to jihad...) Rome’s example is particularly striking- when Ben Franklin said “a republic, if you can keep it” he had them in mind, as they lost theirs after about 500 years.
As far as whether we are an empire or not, I have seen a definition in a textbook for an empire as “a major political unit with a large population and/or large amounts of territory.” A rather loose definition, but it fits the US. We may not have an emperor, but we do have about everything else.
How about the Inca and Aztec empires? I suppose it depends on how large you require for a definition of “empire”, but they had conquered other peoples to expand their power and control and that seems to be the best definition.
We don’t have a classic empire that would be covered by the definitions—but we have a distinct culture an form of government within our nation state—and that culture is under attack from within and without with the economy about to tank with entitlements.
Likely heading toward R2/CW2. Prepared Patriots will resurrect America. Many Obamulans will probably not survive.
Lost my attention right there.
Any chance of that happening in the next 2+ years?
I smell a near-religious belief system that drives all of the authors conclusions.