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manufacturing military stuff that gets blown up or wasted vs. building stuff that improves our trade and commerce and communities and standard of living and forestalls worldwide depression 2.0?
I've recently been looking at my life through a 100 year lens. I realized that the idyllic baby boomer post war years of my youth were the aberration. The prosperity of middle class was the way I thought it had always been. Not so. Not so. Think what working life in America must have been like before the union movement in the thirties!
Remember the movie "Sea Biscuit", where the economically segregated racetrack was pointed out because the trainer could not be in the same area as the wealthy owner. Or the tiered by class decks of the Titanic. Thats what American life has been like for most Americans until the aberrant rise of the middle class post WW2.
A main factor in our post war Happy Days prosperity was that our world competitors had been wiped off the map. We were the only game in town and we invented mass production. We blew their frigging doors in. But, we've seen that turn in the last 30 years or so (what a coincidence, right at the beginning of Reaganomics!) to our war time enemies cleaning our clocks economically. Lots and lots and lots of reasons for that.
NOT THE LEAST OF WHICH IS:
We mandated Germany and Japan become a nation of pacifists, with no army or munitions industries. We were their protectors with our military!!!! So they have less defense spending than us, and we spend extra to also defend them! We don't spend more than the rest of the world combined on the military for nothing!
Doesn't it seem that balancing that back would make a country just go out and have tiny, easily winnable wars every now and then just to keep the prosperity going? OR the War profiteering? Do we want to "share the wealth" by middle class prosperity, or concentrate the wealth, which tends to result in military industrial congressional complexes that need war to perpetuate themselves. Make everybody happy and thrive or make more gated communities borne by the exploitation of masters degree level wage slaves?
just wondering. connect my dots. lick my decals off baby.
-90% Jimmy
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