POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Not an economic model, indeed, but also not a social or political model.
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“The US has a very poor history of government-run enterprises, except the military…”
Except the military?
You have to be kidding. America's military is the most inefficient enterprise on earth.
Billions just disappear into holes.
Projects go over their development costs and time horizons by vast amounts, everything from the V-22 Osprey to the F-35 just in recent years. Billions and billions and billions over budget.
Most of the time, all the military does is sit around consuming resources and doing nothing real or economically beneficial to the majority of society.
Men being paid pretty fair wages, earning early retirement benefits, consuming government food and clothing, and most of them unskilled guys who could not hold on to a decent ordinary job.
Yes, they do something beneficial for America's wealthy establishment, and everyone one else, those who pay taxes, pay the bills. They keep the world safe for American policy and economic expansion of corporations.
The Founding Fathers, most of them, knew a standing army was a terrible waste and a threat to civilian values, but they would have no idea of how dangerous it could be.
It is a fundamental principle of our species - for whom, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - that a great powerful force will be used for some purpose or another by politicians.
Just so Vietnam. America killed an estimated 3 million Vietnamese in horrible fashions and wrecked their land with mines and poisons, ultimately to no purpose whatsoever.
Just so Iraq, with about a million dead owing to America's pointless invasion and a once-prosperous Arab country set back for a generation.
And just so countless coups and intrusions and small conflicts - almost all pointless from a larger point of view and all having nothing to do with the actual defense of the United States.
Even the post office looks efficient and purposeful compared to America's Frankenstein military which consumes the GDP of a decent-sized country every year.
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"Canadians have cornered the market on self-righteous sanctimony, moralistic whining, and self-congratulations."
My God, the American who wrote that either never attends his own local Fourth of July celebrations or is simply blind to what he is used to.
Is there ever a speech in America that does not grate the sensibilities of thoughtful people across the planet?
Just listen to the meaningless rhetoric about democracy or human rights or ethics or blessings from God or freedom from representatives of a government that has crushed democracies time and again, ones that disagree with it, a government which today runs an international torture gulag, and a government in which money determines pretty well everything, from the direction of national policy to the outcome of elections.
You are of course, by those Fourth of July claims, the greatest at everything on the planet.
Perhaps, it is thinking that way that makes you so eager to bomb the crap out of anyone who disagrees with you?
By the way, here is just a small list of comparisons and matters of record where the United States is genuinely number one. I could easily expand it.
Infant mortality is higher in the United States than in Canada.
Average life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Canada.
More people per capita go to prison in the United States than in Canada, but not just Canada, more go to prison than in any other advanced nation, by a long measure.
America has the highest illegitimate birth rate of any advanced country, although its noisy Christians always blubber about that kind of thing and America self-righteously refuses to fund international projects that involve abortions and even birth control.
Americans consume as many illegal drugs as the rest of the world combined.
America spends more on its military each year than the rest of the planet.
America is the world’s largest arms dealer, by far.
America’s murder rate is many times that of Canada.
America’s police forces have an international reputation for brutality, having been cited by organizations like Amnesty International on many occasions.
America has a unique sense of environmentalism, building Jack and Jill bathrooms and three-car garages across the deserts of Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California with never a thought where future water for all those toilets is going to come from and never a care about all the electricity needed for around-the-clock air-conditioning of five-bedroom houses, nor for all the roads and parking lots and cars in an arid region.
No thought for tomorrow could be the new national motto, just as we’ve seen with the irresponsible financial arrangements which threw the world into a crisis.
You cannot even go to a movie from Hollywood without being led to believe America has done everything. It won WWII even though it sustained a loss of about one-third of one percent of the dead in that terrible war where over 50,000,000 died.
There was even a movie some years ago in which America’s broke the German enigma code, not the British who actually did it.
God, what a ridiculous people you’ve become.
