The system is working as designed: shield state actors from liability while increasing police powers.
A few lose their jobs or get fined, but fewer go to jail or have to account for their excesses. I really question the motives of anyone who wants to be a cop in this environment.
That's a hypothesis without much backing, history shows an interventionist hyper power reduces conflict.
We've seen Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica, and now Pax Americana.
There could be shining utopia without military conflict in the future, but personally I'd rather not take the risk during my lifetime. Many equally matched opponents has historically resulted in brutal warfare.
Leaving aside Pax Americana to look at more settled history: none of those events were peaceful in global terms. There's a reason the general term is pax imeperia.
The Pax Romana was 200 years of relative quiet after 700 years of effectively constant war, and followed by another 200 years of war. The thing most historians stress is just how far from peaceful it was. In practice, Roman-held lands were at peace because all resisting inhabitants were already dead, and peace on the border constituted a period of slowed conquest and retrenchment. As soon as the political situation deteriorated, both domestic fighting and foreign glory-seeking resumed.
The Pax Mongolica followed what was per capita the single bloodiest war of conquest in human history, wiping out perhaps 10% of Earth's total population and killing literally every person in several nations. The conquest stopped basically thanks a succession crisis. In return? About 200 years of relative peace and good administration, before the black plague fragmented the khanate. (And if we want to get cynical? The improvements to trade and travel under super- and hyper-powers are a key vector for pandemics. It's not sheer coincidence that disease ended the khanate.)
The Pax Britannica... well, it was accomplished mostly with vicious oppression and butchering local populations until resistance stopped. In return, we got about a century of quiet empire, ending in a global war and yet another world-shaking pandemic (this time, the Spanish Flu).
The history of imperial peaces is one of temporary quietude after an empire has killed off the opposition and reached a pause in its wars of conquest. Fighting remains on the edges, and the peace usually ends in yet another bloodbath as suppressed violence is unleashed - and often as disease wipes out large portions of the empire. It's peace by comparison, not absolute quality.
(The one thing to be said for the Pax Americana is that it's been comparatively bloodless. Even across a double-dozen shadow wars and conquests, the act of conquest was vastly gentler than its predecessors - but the history of such things does not inspire hope.)
Thank you for this response. I don't argue that the way to that peace hasn't been historical bloody, but the pandemics can't be blamed on the empires. Those were inevitable as population and trade grew, a byproduct of urbanization.
> the pandemics can't be blamed on the empires. Those were inevitable as population and trade grew, a byproduct of urbanization.
Fair point. I guess my thought was that empires increase the risk of pandemics, since they tend to come alongside expanded travel and trade. Periods of peaceful empire see population and trade increase faster than technological growth would predict, and disease becomes a frequent limit on their durations. But it's certainly not an intended consequence, and the risk would be rising with urbanization and technological growth regardless.
It's something that worries me about global connectivity, and I think it's a widely underestimated risk. But it's hardly a risk I could hold against Pax Americana; in an era of consumer plane travel nothing short of utter isolationism would constrain the risk. At least in a relatively peaceful world we have proactive monitoring and countries that can work together on treatment and vaccines.
Warren Buffet and other billionaires love to complain that they pay too little in taxes. They could band together and give the IRS more revenue yet they don't. If billionaires won't do the right thing, why the hell do you think small town Joe Schmoe should?
Fractional reserve banking is not what failed in the financial crisis. Multiple things failed, including credit ratings, mutual funds/pensions/etc investing in high risk investments, etc. The biggest risk people think of for fractional reserve - they won't have the money when you need it, a run on banks, etc - didn't really happen in the states in any significant fashion.
That's definitely not proof of real economic utility. How many bets happen in Las Vegas every day? But economically, they're negative-sum events exploiting cognitive weaknesses.
Entertainment can also have negative value. That's what the parent meant: your entertainment is provided by someone exploiting your gambling-addicted (and gambling may cause an actual addiction afaik, no less so than opioid addiction although based on different biochemistry) dopamine circuitry in order to extract actual (social) value.
They mainly provide addiction. Go to a casino sometime and look around. Do those people look like they're entertained? The slot machine zombies barely look human anymore.
You're also wrong about taxes. Consider my local taqueria. They buy raw materials and create value by making ready-to-eat food just when people are hungry. They receive cash in exchange, a portion of which they pay in taxes to fund the infrastructure their business depends upon.
That is positive sum for all participants. It has to be. If taxes tipped it into the negative sum category, they'd eventually close down.
I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0. (assuming for simplification, any rate of positive taxation on income).
This makes no sense at all, and is not how business works.
Most economic activity is positive sum. When I'm hungry and on the go, a taco is more valuable to me than raw taco materials, so I pay more for it. Value has been created. The taqueria owner takes money in, pays their expenses, and is left with a profit. Taxes are paid out of that profit, and you could just as well model it as another kind of expense, a societal infrastructure fee.
I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0.
An awful lot of casino gambling involves series of small stakes bets on low payout options which don't even meaningfully increase upside portfolio variance over time after the house edge has been taken out. Might still be rational from a utilitarian perspective if one really, really enjoys card games of course, but not from a portfolio allocation perspective.
Apart from weird edge cases where an actor needs to double their money overnight to return to solvency in order to have a chance of benefiting from an income stream in future, there aren't many cases where it makes sense from a portfolio allocation basis given the existence of non-negative expectation bets in other markets with a wide range of possible variances. The insurance and investment management industries are built on the principle that economic rationality works in exactly the opposite way to gambling: that inherent value exists in reducing risk.
300 million transactions in 9 years is ridiculously low compared to any "fiat" currency. Googling around I find a post that gives a lower bound for number of debit card transactions in the USA alone as 47 billions for 2012 alone[1]. That's not counting the rest of the world and the other exchange media like cash or bank transfers. 300 million transactions is nothing. I mean thing about it, it's one single transaction for every person in the USA over the course of 9 years. Alternatively it's less one transaction per year for the entire population of Canada.
Amazon alone probably handles more transactions over the course of a couple of weeks.
Gambling has way more transactions. LIBOR options have more transactions. Any actively traded stock has more transactions. None of those things are currency.
A few lose their jobs or get fined, but fewer go to jail or have to account for their excesses. I really question the motives of anyone who wants to be a cop in this environment.