Holding hands,
An elderly couple
Walks slowly through the park.
Like a bee hovering momentarily over flowers,
The couple stops now and then
To share comments about this and that,
Savoring the nectar,
Then moves on to the next attraction,
To the next blossom,
Unhurried, self-contained, free.
All around the couple,
Singles clutch their cell phones,
Ever impatient to be elsewhere.
When was the peak in your life? Why?
Does glyphosate damage your microbiome?
The new financial bubble is government debt. When that bubble bursts, the house of cards will collapse everywhere. It happens when the bond vigilantes demand higher interest rates.
Capitalism is the only economic system that produces any value, in the form of new products and new services and all the employment necessary to produce those products and services.
But you do need some government oversight. Private companies are driven by their financial self-interest, not the public good. A company will sell you arsenic if they can make a profit and think they can get away with it. So that’s where government comes in — a watchdog to make capitalism benign instead of predatory.
There may be as many as 40 million slaves in the world today.
Slavery happens when the local economic system cannot absorb the size of the population, i.e., the surplus population is much bigger than the number of salaried jobs. That is true in many locations around the world.
According to the link below, slaves are much cheaper today than there were at the height of American slavery in the 19th century.
Go back a different way.
What about American interventions in troubled countries where the perception is that we can influence the outcome to be favorable to the United States? I think it is useful to look at examples of when we tried to do this, and accurately see just what actually happened — to see whether such interventions were in fact in the best interest of the United States, not of the country we tried to intervene in but of our own country, the benefit to it.
Vietnam comes to mind. Nearly 60k dead Americans and an untold number of wounded Americans. Perhaps a million dead Vietnamese. And the hyper inflation of the 70s. Not much benefit for the US there.
Iraq — not so many American casualties but a very large number of Americans with very serious wounds. Perhaps a half million Iraqis dead. But then the creation of an internal civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq that spilled over into Syria and destabilized that country. Ultimately an Iraq that is now firmly under the sphere of influence of Iran — one of our adversaries. Not much benefit for the US there.
Afghanistan – the longest war in American history and more or less now a permanent civil war with the Taliban (who by the way never attacked us), and so an endless drain on our treasury. Not much benefit there either.
So where have been the benefits to the United States? What has the United States actually gained from these types of interventions? I only see LOSS, and not small losses either but big ones.
