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Comment by dsq | Hacker News Reader

It's depressing how quickly the move has been from thriving Republic to downfall with very little actual Empire in the middle. The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.

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If you are part of the military industrial complex or the neocon establishment clique then the last three decades (since the start of the unipolar moment) have been extremely enjoyable and decadent as you get a free pass to milk the American empire.

You get lauded by the media as a hero for bombing arabs from the sky with zero possibility of defeat (and if the devastating horror inflected on the civilian population is revealed you get to throw the leakers in a dungeon - see Assange).

All the while transferring a huge chunk of taxpayer money to your chums by giving them lucrative defence contract to wage these pointless wars that do nothing strategically but extend the US debt to astronomical levels (which the entire world must finance due to the dollar hegemony), then in turn your chums reward you with board positions and various other kickbacks (book deals and university, think tank and media jobs).

You face zero possibility of being held accountable for your decisions because while politicians come and go your unelected position is secure and the population scarcely pays attention to foreign policy or public debt.

You hear stuff like this all the time.

So when I first looked into Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, L3Harris and others as an investor, I expected huge margins and booming profits.

Instead I found they have steady earnings with between -5 and +10 % margin. Hardly Republic-eating stuff.

I’m right there with you on public debt, although this is a problem throughout the rich world.

Why would they give the money to you as a retail investor?

They keep it.

There’s a group of like 2000 people or so and they all change jobs every couple years and split the profits and buy houses in Maclean.

It’s distributed via consulting deals, retainer agreements, acquisitions, and so on.

This is conspiratorial thinking which rarely coincides with clear thinking.

You’re describing an incredibly dangerous and unstable game on their part. All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.

It really is not conspiratorial thinking to say there is a huge amount of waste in the defence industry. We are talking tons of cash which absolutely nobody knows where it went.

The Pentagon has failed 6 straight audits. If you ever worked in corporate finance you know how epically dysfunctional financially a corporation must be to fail a single audit.

It has approx 4 trillion in assets. If only 5 -10 % of this is due to some kind of direct or indirect corruption we are talking about hundreds of billion in "waste".

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-...

Waste - of course.

Systematically making a huge (remember, we’re talking big enough to cause the downfall of the States) and then hiding the profits from retail investors? Different story.

Imagine the political windfall someone like Gary Gensler (SEC chair) or a Democrat could get from exposing that? The whole notion is very unstable.

It is indeed very unstable. This is exactly why Eisenhower (who was one of the most hawkish presidents) used his farewell address to warn the public about the growing malign influence of the military-industrial complex (when he coined the term) and which you somehow want to characterise as conspiratorial thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...

Yes, I know all about Eisenhower and his warnings.

That doesn’t mean a conspiracy as described is feasible.

How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US? Skimming a little bit off the top, sure, but large-scale, systematic diversion of so much public money that it ends Pax Americana… no.

There are records of where the money comes from, and where it goes. There are far too many people who could become instant public darlings by exposing it. It’s unstable.

> How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US?

Some remedial reading for you:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America/dp/1...

Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think it's strange or unusual to suggest that there's a conflict of interest between professional manager and shareholders, and that the managers routinely rig things for their own personal benefit? We're both talking about the same country, the United States right? Have you ever heard of Jack Welch?

I grew up in the DC suburbs. I literally know these people, played with their kids when I was a kid. Like I'm really sure.

It's not super complicated. This is basically how the country is run and to some extent has always been run.

Government contract fraud of this kind on the order of couple of million up to a couple of hundred million here and there is terrible and people should go to prison.

It’s enough money to an enormous amount for an individual - ie, your DC friends could buy half a dozen really nice mansions or something.

This is kind of corruption should never be tolerated, but neither should it be mythologized and feared.

What the hell are you talking about?

Like you don't understand that if you're a senior executive at a massive defense contractor you can hire former generals who just signed off on your bid to lucrative consulting agreements, you can put politicians on your board of directors (ie Nikki Haley @ Boeing) and employ their children's PR firms and "strategy consultancies" and so on.

It's not fraud in the legal sense, it's just disgusting and I agree it shouldn't happen. But it's all right out in the open and how the system works.

I'm not really asking if you agree, I'm describing something I have seen first hand.

First of all calm down please. I’m trying to have a factual and calm conversation.

Second of all OK nice and where is all that money going? Sure, generals as directors, politicians making killer stock investments. But I don’t see these trillions in the form of corporate profits, or missing tax money. The money is almost entirely accounted for (ie audited) and the numbers are reasonable.

The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.

> The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.

lmfao

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

I lived in northern VA for a while and have met these people too. The non profit sector there is a similar insider circle.

>All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.

The following fascinating story about stealing money from Pacific fleet operations mentions 27 (twenty seven) whistleblowers whose reports were ignored:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/navy-repeatedl...

Profiteering from the military industrial complex is a much more subtle art than that. There are many sophisticated (and readable) studies about it which you can read.

Sometimes it is not even that subtle. Just take a few minutes to read about Blackwater.

There is profiteering, as with any large industry, especially government-backed ones with near-guaranteed payouts.

But what’s the scale of it? Is it enough to bring down the whole US?

My answer is not even close.

See my other comment. There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited. All we see is the public debt ballooning while infrastructure around us is decaying. Where is the money going?

But we can look at the audited public filings of the defense contractors. And their numbers are really kind of reasonable.

The deficit since October is roughly the same as all defense expenditures: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... So even if they went to zero and didn’t have any effect on revenue, we’d still end up the year with debt ballooning. The lion share of expenditures are non-discretionary, and public debt increase is largely determined by demographics and interest rates.

> There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited.

Pretty boring talking point, since it's mostly audited - the various secret programs are very small in comparison to public ones.

> Where is the money going?

Giant majority goes to various social and medical programs, that only baloon from aging of society and prolonged lifespans without extending workspan.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/2023_US_...

So, in short - pensioners eat all the money.

Talk to people who work there a little higher up in the hierarchy. It’s a super sweet gig with very good money. And while making good money you can wrap yourself in patriotism.

I agree with you, but putting let's not pretend that neocons are the only ones looting the treasury. There's plenty of Democrats getting fat and happy too.

I highly recommend "The Fourth Turning is Here" by Neil Howe. According to the generational theory he co-developed (1):

"The theory states that a crisis recurs in American history after every fourth generation which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis"

We're in a crisis period now. In all his books have provided the best explanation for the highs and lows in American society

If you can't get to the book, just look him up in any podcast or YouTube. But really the books are where the really detailed, convincing evidence lives.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

So the previous crises were the Civil War and the Great Depression/WW2? If so, our current crisis is barely getting started.

Crises culminating in wars going back to the 1400s, but yes, according to the theory this crisis period was triggered by the crash in 2008 and will likely climax sometime between 2028-2035. So this decade's gonna suck, will probably involve a war (civil or great power). But I err on the side that a conflict will leave the country stronger as happened in the past (no guarantee, especially if we lose a great power conflict) and America will be a more egalitarian, prosperous place by the 2040s. Thus the cycle will begin anew and the country will suck again circa 2115

It’s also quite possible none of that happens ;)

We’re naturally trained to find patterns in things.

Yeah like how spring leads to summer leads to autumn leads to winter leads to spring. Or how the sun rises. Or how people are born, grow up, then die. Yeah naturally trained to find patterns, all of it is an illusion.

Or, instead of superficial snark maybe look into the patterns people identify and see if they make any sense. This particular one does

The wrinkle in the generational hypothesis is that the "when" of a crisis being felt may depend on which generation you belong to.

The nature of the major trends in the US have been primarily economic: rising debt being kicked down towards younger people, asset prices rising and concentrating in fewer places. This trend favored the Boomer generation up until recently, since they had relatively more opportunities to get assets when they were young, many of them had long lives in good health, and they were still occupying job positions by the time their children had finished education, setting the stage for the younger cohorts being educated for things they couldn't be hired for. Now that the Boomers are exiting the workforce there's a different kind of turmoil taking place as the economy is trying to put different hands at the wheel. But it's not exactly a new crisis for someone who entered the workforce in the 2010's, it's just incrementally more intense and their sense of crisis may have hit at graduation or even before. In contrast it looks downright apocalyptic to older people who had a long career insulated from the effects of the trends only to abruptly retire into a world of Zoom meetings, high inflation, and understaffed healthcare, while the national leaders are suddenly making radical policy moves that offend their sensibilities.

The stage for crisis is properly set at this point because every generational cohort seems to recognize it as a crisis that needs a reframed social contract, instead of a "that's your problem, not mine". That kind of consensus is the dividing factor. But the specific grievances are a thing that were building up for decades.

Exactly. In his interviews he mentioned a lot of people at the time asked if 9/11 was the triggering of a crisis (the hypothesis had just been published in 1999) and no, it just kind of went by because the generations weren't aligned. Kind of like WW1. Was a major disruptor, but society continued down the same trajectory

Apparently in 1971 the Bretton-Woods agreement[1] was "suspended" and America went off the gold standard. Because the US dollar became both a fiat currency[2] and a reserve currency[3], it meant that we could print as much money as we like. Printing money directly fuels corruption and income inequality. Rather than reconciling bad decisions and balancing a budget, you just print more money. Financialization[4], a force which frequently gets referenced in Boeing threads, is just another consequence of poor monetary policy, as is decline of Rule of Law[5].

Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order is the best explanation I've seen for the general state of America and its clear decline (45m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law

There is plenty of corruption and income inequality regardless of money printing velocity. What would be the causal link between them? There was huge corruption in former Eastern/Soviet Block countries where prices were more or less stable. There was huge inequality in gold-standard feudalism.

Ray Dalio's video explicitly explains the causal link between printing money and corruption.

Printing money (as a fiat reserve currency) implies the decline of rule of law and therefore corruption, but corruption does not imply that money was printed, nor does the lack of printing money imply low corruption.

> "corruption does not imply that money was printed, nor does the lack of printing money imply low corruption."

If corruption is independent of money printing, "Printing money directly fuels corruption" is not a true statement.

I think if you draw out the logical statements I've made one implication correctly. I claimed A implies B is a true statement and that if A implies B is true, that doesn't mean B implies A or ~A implies ~B. (although ~B does imply ~A if A implies B).

True:

  A implies B: Printed money implies a rise of corruption
  ~B implies ~A: Low corruption implies money wasn't printed

False:

  B implies A: A rise in corruption implies printed money
  ~A implies B: Not printing money implies low corruption

I did not say A and B are independent, I said A implies B, not A IFF B.

Exactly. Emmanuel Todd says it in his own way : in the US your best bet is always to work in or around finance, because printing money became the main business in the country. That's also why the US must import engineers massively, for instance. That's why the military industry is under such pressure, because it can't rely upon huge numbers of Indians, Chinese or Russians to conceive and build its airplanes, missiles and nuclear submarines.

> The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.

Which Romans?

I’m fairly sure a lot of powerful Americans have enjoyed a couple hundred years of good wine and some decadence.

Almost everyone now can afford wine and some decadance, from a Roman standard. Roman decadence was grapes and wine and meats and sex. Far more people now have access to far better things than the Romans ever experienced.

wine, meats and sex? What could possibly be better than that?

I'm not saying it could :) I'm just commenting on the "powerful Americans" line, above.

I.e. what they called decadent we call normal, in no small part due to Americans who grew powerful (or rather, rich) by delivering increased value to ordinary people.

> The Romans at least got to enjoy a couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence before things broke down completely.

I’ve been enjoying The History of Rome podcast. It seems like the most consistent thing was civil wars which were followed by purges.

From what I've read, the best years were during the "Five Good Emperors" period, so about a century, but even during the civil unrest periods things were OK if you stayed in your villa with your slaves and vineyards (OK relative to the poor, of course).

Getting really strong "why dont they just eat cake" vibes from this post

This phraseology is still just barely disguised insinuation. Insinuation bad. Make a real, good faith point.

I was trying to make a joke, not a point. I guess I missed the mark.

> but even during the civil unrest periods things were OK if you stayed in your villa with your slaves and vineyards

Well, I mean, this is if you happened to be very rich. Also, of course, for quite a bit of the period it put you in the firing line for proscription, and other Rich Roman Hazards. Particularly after the end of the Republic, the Roman Empire tended to be a fairly hazardous place for rich people; odds were good that you'd end up, at least passively, on the Wrong Side at some point.

Same here.

I'm currently listening around the final years of the Flavian dynasty and I'm wondering when these "couple hundred years of wine, revelry and decadence [in the post-Augustian Empire]" are supposed to arrive.

This is worth meditating! The American empire, like the British before it and the other european while we're at it, are flashes in the pan compared to the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans. It could be that hypocrisy, racism and just wanting the oil/diamonds/gold/consumers is not a formula for lasting success.

One could argue the US has been an empire since we gobbled up the Spanish empire in the Spanish American war. So it has been 125 years or so.

It's time for the US to turn the clock back more then 100 years and regress to isolationist, peripheral economy. Let's hope for a peaceful transition.

Depressing, perhaps, if you're part of the nobility. Heartening, perhaps, of you're one of the workers building the palaces of revelry but never getting to enjoy them.

Essentially, society is highly inequitable, instability is to be expected and is probably only a negative if you're living it up. If you're part of the higher classes gaining rent -- in any form -- from others needs then you'd probably want this 'empire' to live for ever.

Under it all lies greed, and over-population.

Where do people get these class warfare talking points? Is there a new wave of teenagers discovering Das Kapital and then saying stuff like this online?

We used to have strong unions that built a strong middle class. Now everyone's out for themselves and real wages are 1/3rd what they were for our grandparents. We have record numbers of the upper class, and fewer middle class each year.

A lot of people want a middle class life and are seeing the connection between strong unified bargaining and their chances to become middle class.

Once you get a step further than that you'll realize that unions are another mechanism used to control labor[0] and that federal reserve policy on down is designed explicitly to suppress wages[1] so really the only solution is to make politicians fear the people again.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-r... (you aren't allowed to strike beacuse it will cost people money)

[1-1]eg. 2% inflation target was originally suggested as it allowed employers to not give raises and lower their employee expenses over time

[1-2]eg. interest rates were only raised once wages started ticking upward after decades of stagnation and decline, inflation in every other area of the marketplace wasn't a concern and you were labeled some sort of "inflation nut" if you mentioned it

[1-3] now consider trade tariffs that encourage firms to offshore, lack of immigration enforcement creating a unlimited supply of low skill labor, use of below minimum wage prison labor to dilute the power of workers not in prison, welfare programs that subsidize low wage workers who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford working for a employer and you start to think this isn't just a happy accident for the capital class that the world is arranged in this very specific way benefitting them.

Everyone always has, and always will be, looking out for themselves. It’s biological.

I agree that free markets plus free unionization can lead to great results (look at Sweden - no labour laws and strong unions and high wages).

But this hankering for a catastrophically flawed social system (built-in hate for other classes?!) that depends on changing human nature and thus never works is even cringier than Ayn Rand-quoting teenagers who want no government at all.

Does Sweden really not have labor laws?

I don't think the US created these laws just to be nice to people.

Corporations were literally hiring private armies and killing people. So the people voted for laws. Maybe they seem antiquated now, but they did have a reason for being.

And, if there is a class system, like if you are born rich, you get to be rich, if you are born poor you get to stay poor. Then it seems natural to start to dislike each other. How can you fault people born into poverty for disliking the people creating a system to keep them there?

Labor laws are literally created because politicians are trying to win votes by being nice to at least some of the people. Democracy at work.

I’d like to see some numbers for how many people are getting slaughtered in the streets by these roving private armies that have the keys to the city.

And as for the class system, have a look at social mobility now versus 100 years ago vs 1000 years ago vs 10k years ago. Progress remains to be made, but society has never been more fluid and fair.

The laws aren't new. Like they were created last year for an election. They were born out of the early 19 century industrialization/gilded age. Maybe they should be updated, but you are really miss-categorizing the history.

And, social mobility has gone down, the American Dream is gone for a lot of people. Is it still better than being a feudal serf? sure, but don't worship what it has become?

Social Mobility:

Can go find all the sources here. But these are nice summaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_....

Deaths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

Note:

I've worked in union and non-union plants. I can tell you, non-union is no paradise, they have worse safety conditions and worse attitudes and lower pay.

Definitely in non-union plants the workers are just meat.

All the libertarians with their ideals about small government and 'individual rights' are just playing into the corporate desires. Because the more people can be separated into 'individuals', then they can be picked off one by one. You're driving into a dystopian hell scape with eyes wide open.

Government is by the people, for the people, which in todays world is treated like 'socialism'.

> if you are born rich, you get to be rich, if you are born poor you get to stay poor.

I came to the US with $700 in debt. But I didn’t stay poor.

>Then it seems natural to start to dislike each other.

It may be natural, but it seems extremely counterproductive.

> A lot of people want a middle class life and are seeing the connection between strong unified bargaining and their chances to become middle class.

... and the connection between post-Soviet rabid capitalism (I know, the onset of Thatcherism was before that - but only after the USSR collapsed, rabid capitalism really began to take up speed), globalization for goods but not people, and resulting widespread destruction in domestic low-level employment (mining, factories) also becomes more and more apparent.

Well, destruction of a competitor is always good for owners of the company, not for workers.

"Where do people get these class warfare talking points? "

There does seem to be a segment of people that aren't super rich, but are rich enough to be isolated and don't realize there is a huge number of people really struggling. They don't seem to realize 'poor' people exists. Or think they should just get a job.

Typically, this class of 'bour·geoi·sie' don't realize they are benefiting from the 'class war' being waged by the super rich, and that they are actually winning.

There has always been struggle, always poor and rich.

I'm on the side that things are better now than ever. Specifically with a trend line through the COVID dip that we are still recovering from.

People are coming to America by the 1000's everyday because this is the best place in the world for opportunity.

The super rich are not our enemies.

Those sentences are unrelated. Humanity has never needed billionaires and only in abstract theory does their existence benefit the rest.

> Humanity has never needed billionaires and only in abstract theory does their existence benefit the rest.

I’ve witnessed how decisions are made in a country with no billionaires - they were made by Politburo guys. I’ve also witnessed how decisions are made by Elon Mask. I’d have Mask over Politburo every time.

Billionaires are just centers of power who are not subject to the Party ideology and control. Why would anyone refuse having the power more distributed?

America also has good Geography, farm land, rivers, peaceful boarders(despite the rhetoric), oceans for protection.

And, convenient plagues upon settlement, pretty much an empty continent with all of these plentiful resources. Which caused a huge spring board effect.

It's basically an entire country that has survivor bias.

Lol, by living in the World for more decades than a teenager.

Did you have a point to make?

I doubt one in a hundred have actually read any part of the original sources. They get what they know from fifteen second videos.

This is not their fault, however. Reading long form is becoming a specialized skill.

If you think America's administrative competency crisis will make things better for workers, I'd like some of what you're smoking.

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