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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

When not trotting out individuals who want to take money from me at gunpoint to pay for their health care, statists (i.e., Democrats) will often quote the example of Western Europe as example for the rightness and justness of confiscation from those who have, to give to those who haven't, in order to pay for things like, oh, health care.

Fair enough, but let's think a little more broadly. For example, how has Western Europe been able to pay for all these medical benefits? Three ways: confiscatory taxation (especially via the VAT), rationing, and elimination of its militaries. Of the three, it's the military angle that interests me.

Faced with the threat of the USSR, how is it that Western European countries were able to eliminate their militaries and spend the money instead on health care? Why, because they were behind the American aegis. Sure in the knowledge that Americans would die to defend Paris, or Bonn, or London, Western Europe began dismantling its military forces, and spending the money on bureaucrats to gather taxes and oversee the administration of health care rationing.

We're about to see the same thing here. The Imperial US Federal Government has never started an entitlement program that didn't immediately go massively over budget. Now that it's on the road to becoming the single payer for American health care, we can expect to see the military budget axed to pay for Peggy Joseph's liposuction, or some such.

If this is not worrying you, then you are obviously not a student of history (i.e., you are likely a Democrat).

If the US axes its military budget, if it retires itself from its military commitments around the world, what will happen?

Oh, sure, there are those who can't wait for the rise of China. Not gonna happen. China will grow old before it can grow rich. Russia's on a death spiral, and can only cause bits of trouble, like, oh, given nukes to the Iranians. The new Caliphate? Please. When your only technical innovation in a millennium is the suicide vest, your future looks bleak.

Previously, when America withdrew from the world, we got fascism and world war. In the wake of WWII, the US decided it had to engage the world to keep the world stable. And stable the world generally has been, for a lot longer than usual. Sure, it's tempting to turn a back on the world, especially given the general ungratefulness of the people who've been kept safe, but do we really want the consequences?

There is no superpower to take the place of the US. ObamaCare will eventually lead to the gutting of the US military, and the reduction of US world influence to about that of, oh, Sweden.

When that happens, who's going to step into the power vacuum? Yeah. Doesn't look pretty, does it? Still, that's what the Democrat Party has inflicted on us.

This administration really is Jimmy Carter II. We'll still be dealing with its screwups forty years from now.

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