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Comment by amrocha | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure why you think the person you replied to wouldn't have issue with US doing it?

I don't know enough about the situation to guess if their comment about China is 100% accurate or complete nonsense, but if it is the case then I'm against that and against many of the things the US has done to/in other countries over the past century. I'm not American, but even Americans are allowed to have views that don't align with how their country's political leaders have acted over the years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861316

Because I'm right. It's not that hard to extrapolate what people think. It's hard for the "rationalist" crowd to understand but not everyone is arguing in good faith, and humans tend to regurgitate the last opinion they heard from a person they like.

Of course, there's a small amount of time I'll be wrong, and I'm happy to apologize and have a proper discussion when that happens.

The thing that I think is important to recognize about “US imperialism” as compared to colonial imperialism is that they’re very different things. Colonial imperialism was an extractive, money-making endeavor whereas what the US does and has done is focused on power-making.

This is pretty trivial to see if you look at the relative costs compared to the economic benefits the US secures - all US adventurism is a total loss in pure economic terms. You’d never do it if it was about money.

I'm not sure how this even follows from the previous comment, nor does it even make sense to me as a statement about 20th-century US imperialism. As far as I know, overthrowing Latin American governments during the 20th century was for explicitly economic purposes, by way of installing Friedmanite governments sympathetic to selling off all their nationalized resources and to letting foreign companies run amok with no oversight, murdering their employees to prevent unionization, etc.

Nope. It was rather to prevent them falling into the hands of the Russian Empire (aka USSR) who was already shipping arms, financing leftist parties and infiltrating universities. You know, the classic KGB playbook.

The Russian Empire didn't exist in the 1960s, so I really don't see any credibility in your comment.

If you call the US and it’s global influence an empire, then in the 60’s Russia also had an empire. A far more direct one, in fact, as they were occupying Eastern European countries like Ukraine, Estonia, and so many others.

I do call the US "an empire", but I don't refer to "The American Empire" in a discussion of geopolitics. It reeks of bias. The GP wrote "Russian Empire", capitalized, which is the name of a polity that didn't exist in the late 20th century. (And then they later edited their comment to say "(aka the USSR)" to make me look overly pedantic.)

But you are being overly pedantic. “USSR” is simply the name Russia gave to its empire.

American adventurism is usually a loss for the American state, not necessarily a loss for the multinational corporations who benefit from that Adventurism. It's a classic privatize profits, publicize losses scenario.

You're comparing it to something other than what China is alleged to be doing?

>This is pretty trivial to see if you look at the relative costs compared to the economic benefits the US secures - all US adventurism is a total loss in pure economic terms. You’d never do it if it was about money.

CITATION BADLY NEEDED.

Seriously?

The Korean war cost something like 20-30 billion/year in today's dollars [1]. That's just the military expenditure, not counting lost income from alternative uses of manpower and material, veteran care etc.

The bill for the Vietnam war was $120 billion. [2]

Iraq: $1.1 trillion. [3]

Afghanistan: $2.3 trillion. [4]

Can you even think of something hypothetically worth stealing from any of those places which could even just come close to covering the costs?

The only remotely plausible candidate I can come up with is Iraqi oil. At the time it was indeed a common refrain from the usual suspects that the US was only there to grab the oil. But that's not what happened. Iraq's 2005 constitution made it clear that Iraq's oil belongs to the Iraqis, who have since adopted a fee system under which oil companies get a few bucks per barrel (something between $1.6 and $6), and the rest goes to Iraq. [5]

For reference, a barrel currently trades at around $75. Iraq made more than $115 billion on that arrangement during 2022. [6] Even if you generously assumed that oil companies got 10% of that, and that it was all profit, and that they are all American (not even remotely true [7]) it would take a century just to recoup the cost of the Iraqi war.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1344315/us-military-expe...

[2] https://theveteransmuseum.org/visit/exhibits/vietnam/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

[4] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-b...

[5] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=45a8132e-8291...

[6] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230103-iraq-oil-reve...

[7] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/energy/oil/mesopotamian-exodus-why-...

Those wars didn't "cost" trillions of dollars. That's trillions of dollars of subsidies for war contractors, of jobs for troops, etc. The war itself achieves the states political goals, the spending props up the economy. It pays for itself, it wouldn't matter if it "pays off" or not.

> Those wars didn't "cost" trillions of dollars.

Yes, they did.

> The war itself achieves the states political goals, the spending props up the economy.

It props up the economy less then alternative spending of the same ampunt with a higher domestic velocity.

> It pays for itself

It may be a net benefit considering the value of the war aims against the opportunity cost, but that doesn’t change that it has a cost, it just means that (in the right value system) the cost is justified.

No they didn't. Governments don't spend, they invest. That may seem like splitting hairs but it's not. It's not like there were trillions of dollars sitting around waiting to be spent. The real tragedy of war is not that trillions were spent, but that millions of people and resources are poured into it instead of something that improves society.

Your argument of efficiency is inherently flawed. It implies that war is good as long as it's cost effective, which isn't true.

> Governments don't spend,

Yes, they do.

> they invest.

Even if all government spending was investment, investment is just spending in the expectation of future return.

> It's not like there were trillions of dollars sitting around waiting to be spent.

It is literally exactly like that.

> The real tragedy of war is not that trillions were spent

True, that's not the real tragedy of war.

But that's because spending money isn’t tragedy (though the opportunity cost of the choice of how to spend it can be), not because government spending is not-spending, so the trillions spent on war are not-spent.

> Your argument of efficiency is inherently flawed. It implies that war is good as long as it's cost effective, which isn't true.

I thought the context was clear that I was referring to utilitarian justification, whether it is good is a differebt story, sure.

You should educate yourself on macro economics

That’s not how that works. Governments can’t just pay money for things and consider it free so long as they’re employing their own people. Those people could have been employed more productively doing anything else and the entire system is poorer by the amount that the government has spent (to a first approximation).

That is literally how it works. Opportunity cost is only a thing if the private market is willing to capture the excess productive capacity, which it usually isn't. And even then, government has access to levels of scale where they can always be the most efficient employer. Think about the value of building infrastructure vs anything else.

Better the US than the Soviet Union, which were the 2 flavors at the time.

[citation needed]

Search for Clodomiro Almeyda (Allende cabinet minister) quotes and his work "Marxist theory of the state".

He said about 1,000,000 chileans had to perish to fulfill the revolutionary dream or something alone those lines.

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