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Comment by supergauntlet | Hacker News Reader

Interesting angle, but the US war machine has also trampled on the rights and freedoms of thousands. Look no further than Operation Menu in Cambodia, or the countless regime changes we funded in South America.

Surely we could have our cake and eat it too, in this case? Bear the brunt of defense spending but also not waste time on needless wars and coups, and put that towards a welfare state?

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The thing is we don't really know what the world would look like today without post WW2 USA hegemony. Before that, the world was far more violent under what was essentially European hegemony than it is today. Instead of plundering at will, arbitrarily breaking countries up, and colonizing - the USA has taken an approach of world police. And yes, lots of mess ups and greed fueled wars. But the USA has carried the brunt of this policing and the world is safer than it has ever been in the post industrialized period. for the record, Europeans generally thought of themselves as more civilized and sophisticated than the people they were colonizing and the crude Americans. This is not a new perception Europeans have of themselves and is perhaps part of general European identity.

So, we don't know how many of these wars and coups have been "needless" to maintain the peace we have. Perhaps many of them have led to less peaceful times globally, but we can't go back and A/B test this hypothesis. But we shouldn't just assume the world would be peaceful or even more peaceful without continued USA intervention into the affairs of others. Perhaps it would, but history does not suggest so.

> But the USA has carried the brunt of this policing and the world is safer than it has ever been in the post industrialized period.

Maybe since 1989 or so. But if we're talking post-WW2, the Cuban missile crisis nearly erupted into global nuclear war. There were also a number of other near-misses up until the collapse of the USSR. That doesn't seem very safe to me.

I'm not even at odds with the idea that the US playing world police has done good for the world. I'm merely pointing out that when you allow anyone to be world police, you can't do that without some form of accountability. You simply cannot trust people to do good things and hope they won't abuse their power, because with no accountability, they will.

And that's what's happening right now. We have detention camps on the border because there's no accountability for power abuse, we have an entirely unnecessary campaign of bombing that murders children in Yemen because nobody will put their foot down and hold Saudi Arabia accountable. China has detention centers (disguised as "vocational schools") because nobody will hold them accountable. Pharmaceutical companies can jack up the price of insulin 700% over 20 years (FTR, inflation over the 1996-2016 time period was 53%) because there is no accountability.

We'll always need someone to watch the watchers, basically. Because if we don't, they'll abuse their power and trample on the rights of others. And I know the original post was about healthcare, but this still holds true. All of these things are happening at the cost of the standard of living of the average person, because those in power are not accountable to those they represent.

Well I think the exercise of power inherently will result in killing people, manipulation, lies, and general suffering inflicted on some group of unfortunate people.

Not sure it’s as easy as taking a dollar from funding Western Hemisphere coups and putting it towards health care. I think it’s also important to try to appreciate the security concerns of politicians and policy makers during the Cold War when attempting to prevent Soviet/Russian influence from creeping into the hemisphere (Monroe Doctrine).

It's hard to tell if a war is going to be "needless" until it's over.

Was Vietnam a needless war?

How about the Korean war? Was that needless too?

The Korean War is universally and intentionally ignored in such discussions, because to bring it up as an example of a needless war when eg discussing Vietnam is to proclaim the South Koreans should be living like the North Koreans right now. That is, it's to say that they should be enslaved under Communism and living at the very bottom of third-world style conditions. So nobody will dare to say that, they'll just ignore the Korea outcome and focus on Vietnam as the example instead.

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