Best-case by some measures, not by all. And "best-case" in the realistic sense, not the "pie in the sky" ideas like "everybody has the right to life and happiness" or shit like that.
Still makes communism a failed ideology.
RGHRAHRZRHRSHRBHR *gnashes teeth*
Capitalist countries have also failed. Do you know why Communist countries tend to be bad? Because they're the result of revolutions. The status quo has the nice and stable countries, and the revolutions have a SINGLE GREATLEADER with no balance of power. Failure or success of ideologies doesn't play into it.
...unless, of course, the revolution is anarchic like it's supposed to be...
And the only reason why all communist countries are a result of revolution is because communism is so dumb that it could only be enforced on people. No sane knowledgeable person would accept communism for their own country.
Besides, USA is, technically,
itself a result of a revolution, too. Oh, and there's also France, which had French Revolution as its way of feudalism-capitalism transition. And, while they weren't perfectly "nice and stable" since then, seeing as their current government is the 5th Republic, they still managed to transition to democracy while keeping capitalism. Unlike with communist countries, where transition to democracy - real democracy - automatically means discarding communism and embracing capitalism. I wonder why...
Also, "anarchic" revolution? Would it result in an "anarchic" state, too? Because anarchist states are even more of failures than communist ones, and that's saying something.
The big businesses are:
1. Making the externality of climate change
2. Lobbying our government to reduce restrictions - they're in our government
and that's just off the top of my head. They're "driving our economy", sure, but that's not all they're doing
also monopolies are capitalism breaking down, and big business is often a monopoly
also without regulation like the FDA, you'd have even more "mystery meat" aka toxic slurries in your food
it sells, right? that's all that matters to the business
So, your initial point was that USA was "Letting big business fuck everybody else over', but you've just outlined several ways in which USA, in fact, does not let "big business" fuck everybody else. A self-defeating argument, if I ever saw one.
Because MURRICA has more.
And spread over vast barely inhabited territories, making their effective exploitation require building massive continental infrastructure. Meanwhile, Europe had access to not just its own massive resources, but to resources of three more continents, via colonial system. Which still hasn't helped them, because they wasted all these resources on fighting each other.
America has had success, yes, but that's not because it's BEST NUMBER ONE MOST SUCCESSFUL GOVERNMENT EVERYTHING'S SWELL
1) Show me a government more successful that USA's one.
2) German scientists were definitely not the cause of American success.
never said they were. I said that we don't have many nearby neighbors who'd like to kill us, so it's easy not to join a war.
That's because you've absorbed all of them and incorporated them into your United States. It's not like USA was just given all its territory from day 1, you know. If Americans in USA have not chosen their best government system that successfully prevented any competitor states from forming via massive territory purchase agreements and massive patriotism indoctrination of every citizen every day, there could've been three or four states on the territory of modern USA, and they would've undoubtedly waged a couple of wars on each other.
* America starts a war for the purpose of profiting from it.
* Alternatively, America profits from an existing war.
* Your response: "It just goes to show that America is the best, because wars aren't unavoidable natural disasters."
wut
I don't actually remember if USA has started any war with the purpose of getting rich from it. Maybe with the exception of Philippines land grab, but that was in the same Gilded Age period when USA has almost gone bonkers.
Besides, the point is, USA can profit from wars, because they don't happen near it, because USA has done its homework on preventing any enemies from arising in its neighbourhood, while Europeans have not.
There are a few reasons for that; poorer regions have more wars. This link says why they're poorer.
Also, again, USA is a COUNTRY.
Oh yeah, poorer regions have more wars, that's why there were almost no wars in extremely rich Europe
oh waitAlso, again, USA is a country because it eliminated all competition early on. Europeans could've done the same, if they had a similarly powerful political system - but, alas, they were too mired in their monarchic feudal shit to realize that possibility. Even now they still are too busy squabbling with each other, instead of focusing their efforts at uniting and forming what would undoubtedly be a #1 world's super-power. A pity.
Because they became a single country; there are multiple states, but they have an overarching government. Europe doesn't have that.
See, you've answered it yourself - USA government and the political system lying underneath it is the key to USA being a single country.
Define number one. It is successful, yes. But the fact that I can use domestic products doesn't make it NUMBER ONE.
#1 is #1. Every economical and technological sphere you look at, USA is the best. Its GDP per capita is bigger than everybody else's, its military is bigger than everybody else's, its technological products dominate the world, its financial system is literally the foundation of world's entire economy.
I guess it's hard to see the greatness of USA from inside of it, but trust me, USA's influence is obvious even in the furthest reaches of the world. No other country has that.
Would you say the same about people? Is it "loser talk" to say that maybe people don't succeed sometimes because they didn't get the same opportunities? (If so then GLRHRAZRHSBRBLE *grinding noise*)
I see you're starting to lose my line of thought. Here, look at the part that you've not noticed:
Luck matters, but ability to use said luck matters much more
It's fairly obvious that when I say that "luck matters", I mean that "luck
matters".
Needs reference to a specific representative country - and if you're talking about the Middle East, that's the US's handiwork.
Sure, I even had two of them in mind. USSR and Russia.
We've been successful, so we shouldn't change anything. Suuuure. It's pretty clear that, ferex, more regulations on carbon would be ubergood. Shouldn't we change that?
And anyway if our criterion for NUMBER ONE is "victory after victory", I bet you're longing for the Imperialist era, or for warfare. Conquer the world! (If that's not you, reconsider your criterion.)
I'm pretty sure that, if not for the Republican evil sabotaging your country with their evil pro-Putinist ways, there would be more regulations on carbon coming up. If they didn't exist as they are, the obstructionist pro-monopolist warmongers, they would probably be coming 8 years ago, or maybe even 16.
And by "victory", I didn't mean just a military victory. Economical victory counts, too. Technological, social - things like that are victories, too. Really, what I meant was "repeated success". USA has had it, like no others.
Those were actually state capitalism. So they weren't even communism.
We are not talking about the utopia version of communism, obviously.
Why do wars happen? Because people are greedy, because people hate. It's not a failure of government.
You say that like Americans are not people. Wars can be prevented, and they can be facilitated. Governments take a big part in this activity, as seen in Cold War, where many wars were started simply because of the world-wide conflict of ideologies, with sides getting massive financial support from USA/USSR. After Cold War was over, many wars were then prevented or limited in their scale by USA acting an an ultimate arbiter of peace.
Because of the propaganda machine, of course.
That doesn't explain why there are still regulations in place, then.
And it's a driving force for both of them, too. We might be able to unfuck things, who knows?
USA, driving force of conflicts? Are you serious? Outside of Republican-induced bouts of stupid invasions, USA has pretty much single-handedly established a world-wide era of relative peace never seen before in history. As for global warming... China, India, pretty much every other industrializing country.
...I guess you're right... it is pretty good on that front.
Wait a second, "Pax Americana"? Does that extend to the Middle East?
Pretty sure that no, it doesn't. Middle East is pretty much doomed to war with itself for the foreseeable future, anyway, mostly because they've just became too radicalized, thanks to Saudi Arabia. That's one of the few foreign policy mistakes that USA did.
And, unsurprisingly enough, Republicans are the main supporters of alliance between USA and Saudi Arabia.
It's not the worst... but in terms of foreign policy it's been bad, it's been lagging behind Europe in many QoL measures... I think we could make things a lot better.
Europe could afford so many QoL measures because it mostly relied on USA to take care of the "capital growth" part since the end of WW2 and the Marshall plan. Also, USA has invested quite a lot of funds into making Western Europe a very high QoL place, in part because it was needed to prevent communist revolutions from happening there, in part because it was a good way to demonstrate to communist countries' citizens just how bad their economy was.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1425515 times)