Posted on 10/12/2008 7:27:13 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
October 12, 2008
Is this the end of the American era?
Paul Kennedy
A few nights ago, having read far too much about the alarming drop of share prices on Wall Street, I fell asleep trying to remember those lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias that were drummed into my skull at school long ago: . . . Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare . . . Has it come to this for the American imperium as well? Will George Bush’s vast legs of stone lie in the desert outside Crawford, Texas, like Ozymandias’s crumpled statue at Luxor? Given the number of e-mails that I have received – from Brazil, Korea, China and beyond – this is the burning issue. What is more, most presume that the fundamental answer is “yes”.
Yes, the American “mission impossible” 500 lb gorilla is crumbling into the sands, its pretentious military overstretch now compounded by its loose fiscal stupidities. Don’t you agree with that, Professor Kennedy? Hasn’t your controversial prediction in the closing parts of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers been realised?
Well, slow down a minute. It is one thing to argue that the United States has been weakened by fiscal extravagance and military overstretch. It is a separate thing to recall that, regardless of regime follies, from century to century economic and military balances do shift gradually from one country or part of the world to another.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Time to eradicate leeches. Start with those who think that the border is merely an outdated impediment to making profit. And those who want to care about 'little people' with tax payer's money. Especially, overeducated liberals, who live on doles from 'caring' hedge funders.
Ping!
ibd the other day was arguing that the u.s. economy will
be double europe’s within a decade.
This guy is writing an article about the fall of the U.S. and he is in England? Good God his country is going to hell, overrun by foreigners and he is too busy watching Manchester United.
To see a Radical Islamic Militant like Farrakhan call Obama the Messiah paints a very dim future for America. You are about to witness massive voter fraud. Our country is being overrun by terrorist supporters like this and the change you will get will not resemble Obama’s message.
Obama is a puppet in the hands of Islam. Some else will be pulling his strings. I am just curious as to why W’s faith was so scary and Obama’s faith seems so tame to the Liberals?
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
-~~Ludwig Von Mises
Some of them really care more about how they look good among those overeducated liberals.
Yes. Look at who may be going to the White House...( I ain’t talkin about McCain)
The $640,000,000,000.00 question is has anyone learned anything? Does anyone ever, really?
In a putatively free nation, if individuals aren't going to be allowed to fail, the nation must fail. This is so even when the individuals are large feckless organizations managed by arrogant and stupid people.
Still, the end of the United States has been predicted and pined for more than once in the past.
Ah, Mises. If only more people knew about and understood Austrian economics...
All they feel is just disbelief. They can't understand nor make sense out of. You don't know unfathomable conceit inside them. Their intellect only magnifies their conceit just as derivatives amplifies some financial whiz's arrogance and reckless greed.
We’ll all be getting a hard lesson in Austrian economics very soon.
Most won’t know what they are learning though, and will beg for central planning to save them.
For example, what is McCain’s “buy all the bad mortgages” program but a macro example of price control?
When has this ever worked, ever? When has it not made a bad situation worse, ever?
And he’s the “conservative!” Obama will be ten times worse!
We’re screwed.
In the Great Depression, the U.S. and Britain had serious problems. They were light years better off than everyone else. When there is international turmoil there is a flight to safety that can only benefit the U.S. It may be hard but the U.S. can gain relatively while losing some in the short term.
And by the way, will everyone please repeat after me:
AMERICA IS NOT AN EMPIRE! AMERICA IS NOT AN EMPIRE!
It doesn't matter how much Patsy Buchanan and Paul Kennedy say it, AMERICA IS NOT AN EMPIRE!
Thomas Jefferson - 3rd. President, Democrat
Term of Office: March 4, 1801 to March 4, 1809
“A government big enough to give you everything you
want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”
That is why Putin is squawking. It appears that he did not spend enough time for building good fallout shelter. The pathetic little KGB functionary deserves to be ruined.
I agree with you. This is not a case of the US loses everyone else wins. If the US suffers, the rest of the world will also see a huge decline and in most cases a worst decline. The US is the only country that can ignite global growth - don’t think for a second anyone else can.
People are not as smart as they think. They can only change when faced with horrendous consequence of their stupidity. We are getting there. Many flower children will die bitter. It won't be just for lack of money. Their conceit would be finally blown into dust.
When you consider that: (a) no nation on earth can buy or sell oil without executing those transactions in U.S. dollars, and (b) U.S. Customs has a law enforcement presence in more than 100 countries around the world, you'd have a hard time convincing me that the U.S. isn't an empire.
USSR failed so no one is too big to fail. I think this crisis goes back to 9/11. Greenspan flooded the market with cheap money. The feds pumped so much money into the market the only way to place it was loose and fancy lending rules. Osama started it and the finally will be a Hussien President. Who would have thought.
America is a nation with a big presence. Huge difference between that an an empire with “subjects,” and if you don’t know that difference, I can’t convince you anyway.
The mortgage lending fiasco may have ironically done what many Freepers wanted done by military force: it has reduced China by several orders of magnitude.
Price controls never work. Whether they’re anti-price gouging laws or propping prices up, they always fail and lead to more pain than the market’s price would be.
They figure they can always outlast their adversary. Don't let them outlast America in your lifetime.:-)
Did you see Blunt on This Week this morning? He could have slammed Barney Frank but instead “took the high road” and said something like “all of us have blame but the democrats need to admit it, too.”
Frank stated again that he wasn’t in charge for 6 years and Blunt never said a thing about how him and Waters and Dodd blocked every thing.
You sound a rat supporter. The rats are the party of huge government, big labor, big trial lawyers, big environmentalists, big welfare, big taxes, and class warfare. You seem to be singing their song.
McCain has many faults. He is too much of a populist trying to out populist the rats. He cannot clearly articulate an alternative vision for the economy. Despite his faults, his vision and ideas are dramatically different than the rats, partly because the rat vision is so extreme.
McCain has some sensible ideas about health care. He wants to move health care to the individual, away from the employer. He wants competition across state lines. He wants to remove some mandated coverage. I think these ideas are reasonable. He probably favors reducing the role of trial lawyers in health care decisions. There is no silver bullet for health care. Health care is expensive because it is very labor intensive, medical training is expensive, medical research and development is expensive, and demand is increasing. In contrast, the rats propose a massive government takeover. Now BHO is talking about mandated coverage. Mandated coverage will morph into single payer health care because the rat vision is health care is right. Single payer health care will be a bigger disaster in this country than other countries.
That's what I see too. Then, a world war will erase our debt on the planetary balance books, and the bankers can start over again robbing the industry of free individuals with their monopoly over the monetary supply.
Just my cynical prediction.
Now, the way to look at this is that while a strong dollar hurts Chinese exports to us, it is an absolute necessity for their financial security. If the dollar collapses, so do Chinese dollar holdings, meaning the end of China as we know it. It was the same predicament the Soviets were in. They needed dollar reserves, but each new dollar reserve they held merely made the dollar stronger!
Maybe he should check with those crap-heads who wrote The New American Century.
Is this the end of the American era?
No.
Will this financial crisis be the end of the European Union?
Probably.
Great post!
Typical of people around here. No creativity or imagination! If you want to take serious action on the cost of medicine you must be a “rat> how about this. $40-50% of the cost of Medical insurance is from commissions and marketing. How about a national buyer cooperative for health insurance? You pay a small fee to be underwritten and placed in a risk pool after you decide on one of several health plants. The company’s then compete by bidding for the policies. the company that can get the lowest bid is the most efficient at manging the cost. Okay, the government starts the cooperative but after a few years when it is established the ownership of the coop passes to the policy holders and it no longer becomes a government agency. You have free markets and private business making it very efficient and the policy holders ownership make sure it is responsive. does that sound like socialism? Is that not better than the status quo or anything the “rats†can come up with?
Please keep in mind when reading this article that the author (Paul Kennedy) should have his crystal ball permit revoked.
This is the same guy who said that the U.S. was suffering from “imperial exhaustion” in 1989!
This guy has some pretty amazing gall to stay in the geo-strategic guru business given his track record.
You're right. We are. I called it as soon as McCain became the GOP candidate. I even knew it was going to be the economy, but thought that the stuff would wait until after the election before it hit the fan. I'm tempted to write to the talk radio person that I wrote to about it back in June to tell her, "I told you & you thought I was just some kind of nut."
Upchuck Schumer was afraid the economy wouldn’t tailspin fast enough for the media to blame it on the pubbies before the elction, so he started the dominoes falling with his smear of Indymac bank [I think that was the one he fingered in the press that failed within days due to a run on the bank caused by Schumer’s well aired comments]. Democrats don’t care what mayhem they cause so long as it empowers their schemes. The slaughter of tens of millions of once alive unborn ought to have shown us that, because the democrat party has used their protection, defense, and funding of that slaughter to empower democrat legislators like Boxer and Harkin.
Mayhem is part of their plan, so they've no reason to be bothered by it. They know it's the only way they'll ever be able to usher in their Utopian ideal.
The slaughter of tens of millions of once alive unborn ought to have shown us that, because the democrat party has used their protection, defense, and funding of that slaughter to empower democrat legislators like Boxer and Harkin.
It's not just the slaughter, but the cannibalism they promote to those in need. I know cannibalism is a strong word, so I'm likely to be called a raving nutter for using it, but it is how I see using embryonic stem cells to try to cure people of terrible conditions.
And don't get me started about David Axelrod and his layers of lies for Barack Obama to try and cover the truth with layers of obfuscation. Deceit is all the man is about, deceiving people to get elected a man too devious to win the election on any merit. And the Chris Wallace specatcle this morning, of allowing Axelrod to lie repeatedly and interrupt at will the McCain spokesman was just pathetic. I guess it runs in the Wallace family.
Who better to predict the fall of the USA than a Brit? They’ve actually been there, done that. They can speak from experience. That said, China is definitely poised to take the reigns from the USA. I am guessing it will happen someday, but I am not certain about it.
China will never be as free as we are. We are the most optimistic, creative, free people on the planet, and as long as we fight off our politicians, we will never lose our #1 billing. The problem is simple.
The idiot LibDemCommunists are giving more and more power to the federal government, insuring that someday we are as bound and tyrannized as the Chinese people. When that day comes, it will just be their massive population working at lower labor rates vs. us and China will have taken the top spot.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
In reference to the paragraph above, It is crystal clear to me that we are moving from apathy to dependence. We blew through abundance earlier last century. I don’t know when we slipped into apathy, but clearly the LibDemCommunists are embracing dependence with open arms. You know what comes next.
I hope you like B&D. Mistress America is getting ready to put the bondage on her slaves. Obama will no doubt accelerate this “change”.
LOL. I like the cat. Nice touch...
The question is not, who will weather the downturn, but who will lead the recovery. China is becoming a manufacturing juggernaut. It is not IMPOSSIBLE that China is the economic engine that leads us out of the collapse and into the future.
Boy DO I HATE TO EVEN STATE THAT POSSIBILITY. I hate communist China. I hate their strong-arm ruthlessness in everything right down to international trade and finance.
But the fact is, the USA lead out of the Great Depression with manufacturing and poured it on during WWII. We aren’t going to do that after this collapse. (I’m not saying this crisis is the collapse, but it certainly has all the makings and I no longer expect the world government’s have enough collective money or power to prevent the coming collapse, so my current money is on “we collapse”.)
China is perfectly poised to lead the world out of this collapse and if they do, they will begin to overtake the USA as the world’s foremost economic power and US hegemony will have ended, ala Great Britain.
This is NOT a forgone conclusion.
The only chance we have is our national character, if it is still in tact, and our national optimism.
If we still have the drive to be #1, the motivation to take risks, the optimism to spit in the demons eye and take him head on, and the political freedom to fail and fail and fail on the way to success, then we hold China off and retain our status as #1 economic superpower.
If on the other hand, we have gone to fat and lazy. If we look to goverment to solve all of our problems, if our immigrant population truly has not assimilated, if people have lost their Christian values and don’t help and trust one another, then it truly is over. Then we might as well just open our doors to the Chinese now and save everybody a lot of time and trouble.
There is no escaping the collapse. We are in for it. It is here.
For my own part, I think the American Character is still in tact and I think Americans will step up and meet the challenge.
How many people started to think Americans were too fat, dumb and lazy to fight. We lost it. Yet look at the Iraq war. There have been amazing feats of sacrifice and heroism by not just native born Americans but by the children of immigrants, and they have all stepped up to the challenge.
This is not over by a long shot. I think the American Character is still in tact and I think that this is going to be America’s finest victory. My only trepidation is the socialist cancer. So we have to fight a battle on two fronts. We have to fight through bad economic times and we have to fight off the nation’s embedded communists who would try to seize power during the turbulence.
I’m optimistic. I think we are going to be freer at the end of it rather than less free. Obama is going to do everything possible to consolidate communist power during the collapse. And I think he is going to face an unstoppable backlash that is going to make him back down and change course, tail between his legs. I think a lot of politicians are going to go down during this collapse and Americans are going to wise up to the
It’s not over. Well, the fight for economic reflation is. But the fight for American superiority is not.
I've been hearing a lot of Obama lies for weeks, on radio & the tube. I've also gotten a couple of robo calls from "my union(s) & my mailbox has been cluttered up with pro-Bambi fliers. Battleground status, hammered with an undue share of advertising, so the rest of the country doesn't have to be.
And the Chris Wallace specatcle this morning, of allowing Axelrod to lie repeatedly and interrupt at will the McCain spokesman was just pathetic. I guess it runs in the Wallace family.
I rarely watch any of the networks anymore & certainly not on Sunday mornings. I don't have high blood pressure, but I think that's mostly because I don't subject myself to the kinds of things that would set my blood a-boiling anymore. I even took a break from FR during the primaries, because it was getting too toxic for my taste.
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