Comment

Laura Ingraham: Did "BHO" Push Out Petraeus to Keep Him Silent About Benghazi?

325
lostlakehiker11/09/2012 5:17:25 pm PST

re: #298 Killgore Trout

Probably. If I had to take a guess I’d say that a large part of our domestic economic success depends on the influence that our military buys with maintaining a certain global order abroad. Not just oil but other resources, stabilizing certain regions, insuring access to certain markets etc. If this is correct we’re going to have to fix our domestic economic model before there’s any hope of significant reductions in military spending. That’s probably very doubtful any time soon. For now it’s just a pipe dream.

A large part of every nation’s current prosperity rests on this Pax Americana. If we didn’t do it, China’s navy would patrol the seas and put down piracy. Because somebody’s got to. China’s armed forces would intervene in wars over resource-grabbing such as Iraq’s short-lived conquest of Kuwait.

We need to fix our domestic economic model because access to resources needs more than just open sea lanes and a degree of order in the producing country. It needs a dollar that has some credibility, and it needs an economy that can produce real things of value with which to outbid others for the resources.

As the rest of the world catches up, and as we run these large deficits, both these “needs” become tough to meet. Other nations are going to buy up more, leaving less for us. So we’ll have to make do with less. Less oil, less of various rare earth elements, less cocoa and tea and coffee.

The rare earths shortage will be really painful unless we can open some mines of our own. Since these are needed for producing the magnets used in wind turbines, they could become a bottleneck to green energy and energy independence.

We need to fix other parts of our domestic economic model. While we can produce more and more with fewer and fewer workers, and while this solves the production problem, it doesn’t solve the distribution problem. I don’t see that anybody has a good answer just yet.