In a war for existence waged by a capable and ruthless enemy against America, such kill ratios will be well appreciated. When the conflict is morally ambiguous, the enormity of our responsibility to use the American military responsibly is evident. I believe we have failed and are continuing to fail this test in the Bush and Obama administrations.

The other cause for concern is that the massive fraud perpetrated by realtors, appraisers, mortgage originators, rating agencies, banks, and investment houses in the run-up to the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse is going largely un-investigated and unpunished. It is more expedient to re-inflate assets, preserve the wealth of bondholders and finance workers, and re-capitalize banks than to identify and correct the excesses that caused the financial melt-down.

I lived through the Watergate crisis as a teenager and remember well the almost daily exposes and outrage at the excesses of the Nixon administration. There seems to be little sense of moral outrage in 2009, even when we spy on our own people, torture captives in contravention to international law, and steal shamelessly from each other.

It seems nothing fazes us these days, which is fine when the stakes are low. But when the issues are of major importance, a higher level of thoughtful engagement is needed from the American people, starting with but not ending at our representatives in Government.

I’m not saying I like it at 22 percent. I’m just pointing out that this isn’t evidence we’re headed toward a dystopian future where the government consumes an ever-larger share of the economy.

Fair enough about the spending. I’m pretty pessimistic though because more and more of my daily activities are regulated by the government at some level.

Increasingly I have fewer choices in what I can do with my property, how I earn a living, how I live, etc. I’m increasingly monitored online, while driving, while walking through major metropolitan cities. My financial transactions are monitored, my travel to foreign cities is limited (Cuba), my biological information is increasingly logged (drivers license requires fingerprints).

I’m increasingly violating laws I’m not even aware of. Even the definition of criminal activity has changed from causing-and-intending-to-cause-harm to violating an administrative rule even if not aware of it and even if nobody was harmed. Law enforcement is increasingly militarized, and even the military has been deployed to to the U.S..

I’m a little pessimistic because empires seem to have cycles and our choices, historically speaking, are live in the dystopia or fix it with a revolution. I’ll take revolution, but that still sucks.

“HTownTejas,

Government spending a percentage of GDP has been basically constant–fluctuating between 18 and 22 percent–for the last half century. The stimulus package will likely create a spike for 2009-10, but there’s no evidence of an upward long-term trend.”

1, that’s really high considering the meager powers our Federal Government is supposed to have, and 2, given their Constitutional constraints I’m not sure that government spending should be linear tracking GDP growth. At 18-22% of GDP we can afford, and are getting, an aweful lot of tyranny.

Government spending a percentage of GDP has been basically constant–fluctuating between 18 and 22 percent–for the last half century. The stimulus package will likely create a spike for 2009-10, but there’s no evidence of an upward long-term trend.

jonnybutter

I agree the analogy isn’t precise, but I view the deregulation of the 1970s was an example of economic elites being taken to the cleaners by a popular backlash. Also, I think part of what’s going on is that public opinion moves fairly slowly. The dominance of Washington by Wall Street has only become really obvious in the last year or so. I think it’ll take a few more election cycles before a politician comes along who can make it a really salient issue.

Robbie,

I think part of what’s going on is that in 2008 voters concluded (not unreasonably) that the solution to elect a Democrat to the White House and give the Democrats larger majorities in the House and Senate. If Obama and Dems in Congress screw it up, I think the next backlash is likely to be less partisan and more broadly anti-incumbent. This is at least roughly parallel to the situation of the 1960s: LBJ was unpopular so they elected Richard Nixon. When he screwed up, that opened the door to a decade of strong anti-incumbent politics that was directed against elites in both parties.

“Don’t believe them, don’t fear them, don’t ask anything of them.” My favorite Solzhenitsyn quote. I think the bottom-up answer for the people worrying that politics still isn’t making anyone’s life any better is to look at China. There is optimism, there is growth, there is a positive sense of the future — and the country literally run by a mafia that deeply reveres the philosophy of Mao Zedong. Governments can and will do whatever helps them advance the interests of the people controlling them — it is a vector of human social organization that is at least as persistent and predictable as human sexuality. Certain people just have to be on stage and feel important — you can find them in every elementary school. 1% of them become politicians, 2% of them become investment bankers, .0005% of them get shows on MSNBC or Fox. They are just there in the background, always obnoxious, always wrong, always coming up with ingenious scams and rackets. These people exist in Argentina, and they are the politicians and public-private partnership flim-flam artists there too. It is not so clear to me how much these people matter (pessimism is believing they matter a lot, optimism the reverse.) In any case they matter vanishingly little to an individual life as compared to, say, the decision about what to major in that you make at 19. I think to the extent that countries do decline it is much deeper, complex, and mysterious than electing bad politicians — and also probably has a lot of material and technological factors. If I had the sense that the US is in decline (which it is relatively, and in pockets absolutely), I would say the cause is in the erosion of respect for learning, the widespread cultural desire to emulate famous people who make money without working, and a general cultural replacement of day-to-day reasoning and problem-solving into rule-making.

-Incompetently executed Iraq War based on lies and distrotions to begin with
-Neglect of war against Taliban/al-Qaeda in Afghanistan due to focus on above
-Warrantless wiretapping on a vast scale
-Abu Ghraib and widespread use of torture by our government
-Firing of U.S. Attorneys for political reasons
-Economic strategy based on the invincibility of a ridiculous housing bubble
-Hideous handling of Hurricane Katrina from start to finish

Then at the end:

-Near total collapse of world financial system and new Great Depression, which thankfully seems to have been averted

But despite all of that, we need another Vietnam/Watergate to wake us up and change the country? I don’t really get it. We already got a redux of Vietnam/Watergate and the Great Depression in one Administration. Granted, we were able to pull ourselves back from the edge, but can we not learn any lessons from this?