[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=spdrun]FlyerInHI: What’s wrong with just living and letting the other countries take over the world? Fuck our responsibility. Maybe the world would be better off split between the Russians, Chinese, or Iranians. We have enough nuclear weapons to deter invasion, so it might alter our economy, but it won’t alter our rights materially.[/quote]
Because well-being is relative.
There is such as thing as keeping up with the Jones (or even surpassing the Jones) that make people happy and motivates them.
Europe, for a time, went its own way to maximize well-being the way they saw it.
In America, our academics perfected capitalism and developed new ways to make capitalism provide us more material goods and to maximize GDP growth.
Europe (and the rest of the world) then looked at us with envy and changed directions to our way of doing things.
So we won. Our way is the way.[/quote]
We learned how to destroy other countries’ productive capacity. We bombed them back a few decades, at least. We know how to bully other countries and how to stake a claim to their resources.
