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"In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream-and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot."

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Arachipelago

Link

1. USA vs Japan (WWII)

The world was in a global Great Depression.

2. Germany vs France (Franco-Prussian War)

Check out this article written 20 days before the start of that war.

3. USA vs UK (War of 1812)

"Failing in peaceful efforts and facing an economic depression, some Americans began to argue for a declaration of war to redeem the national honor." source

4. France vs UK (Napoleonic Wars)

"It has been estimated that in France and Britain by the end of the [18th] century 10 percent of the people were dependent on charity or begging for food." source

5. France vs UK (Seven Years War)

See rebuke of number 4.

I probably could have named five just between UK and France. Seriously, they must hate each other.

Or they are just near each other and fight every time economic conditions drop.

The GP also said it "reeks of mercantilism", not that it was. I agree with that in that the motivations and mechanisms behind

1) The failure to regulate monopolies sufficiently 2) Other bad domestic regulation 3) Protectionism, subsidy of exporting industries etc in international trade

are much the same.

Incidentally, most of the definitions I can find of mercantilism do include some domestic policy issues, for example monopolies, see here: http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures /mercantilism.html

"In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream-and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot."
- Source

I have yet to see a private charity that disburses 99.2 percent of what it brings in.

That is not quite an accurate assessment. See Robert Genetski's essay to understand why. Summary: the SSA is actually extremely efficient at disbursing benefits, but some expenses are outsourced and are not accurately reflected in the efficiency figures you see generally bandied about. When accounting for all costs like the very low returns, the overall program's efficiency fares very poorly.

And if private charities are so hot, why did we need SS in the first place?

Statements like this without discussing the context of the Great Depression carry no weight. While it is impressive to say for example, 4 hospitals in New York reported 95 deaths from starvation, mortality surveys result in summaries that say "There was no sharp rise in deaths from starvation and disease. On the contrary, the world death-rate declined in the 1930's, and life expectancy continued to rise." As for people freezing to death, in the late 20th century in America, the CDC reported an annualized rate of 1,552 deaths from hypothermia over a 9 year period. As late as 2003, we simply expect about 600 deaths from hypothermia per year. If you want to refute the League of Nations' morbidity tables that show no statistically significant increase in malnutrition and hypothermia related deaths, then please share the source material you reference for your claim whose sum total of these deaths exceeds the per capita rate in the ten year periods immediately before and after the Great Depression.

While the nation suffered hardships, and there undoubtedly were some people who passed away because the economic impact mortally affected their nutrition or sources of heat, it was not noticeably more than any other period, and the records say it was actually less.

If the rationale for establishing Social Security was because people were starving to death and freezing to death, then we did not "need" Social Security then, and we don't need it now. It was a political football from its genesis to its current form today. You can cry all you want about "heartless extreme right wingers", but the simple fact of the matter is that as a nation, we simply lack the out of pocket funds to pay for its future liabilities as currently constituted. Billions of Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Europeans via their central banks are floating the entire American financial house of cards, which is the only reason Social Security even stands today. Dude, you have not seen heartless yet. The day Mr. Market comes to collect rent, interest, and back penalties, you'll see heartless that will take the breath away of even the spawn of Sauron and Darth Vader.

The choice is as stark as it is simple. Either let social welfare programs' fiscal demands continue to erode the nation's financial standing, and one day figure out how to deal with the aftermath of a collapse worse on senior citizens than the Soviet Union's. Or figure out today how to restructure the nation's finances to a sustainable footing while we still have the thin resources to even contemplate doing so.

If not supporting Micro$oft and increasing their stranglehold on development and innovation makes us communists, what does it make those who support Micro$soft's dictatorship?

I think there's a name for those who consolidate power under themselves, and who keep the citizens in place through threats and violence (or in MS's case, through threats and lawsuits). Can you say "Totalitarianism"?

I agree with others sentiments... Gates seems to be as out of the loop on what consumers want out of their PC's, as Bush, who is totally out of the loop as far as how his actions make him and the USA appear to others.

I think ol' Billy Gates needs to get back to his roots and fast! MS's recent blatherings about IE not needing any updates until 2006/2007, as well as their Longhorn/Roadmap fiasco clearly show that they're no longer the leaders they once were. Instead, they're now riding the ever-decreasing wave of profit that their past performance has provided them with. Eventually this wave will die out (it'd last longer if they gave up on their XBox aspirations!), and then we'll see how Micro$oft can handle 21st century computing.

After Tiger comes out, and Apple rolls out their $500 computer (if rumors are true), there'll (hopefully/expectantly) be an ever increasing flow of fed up Windows users migrating to Linux and OSX. Firefox has proven that non-MS software is a good thing to the unwashed masses, and they're now starting to reconsider that Windows investment. Hopefully by the time Longhorn hits the streets, the business world will be waking up to cheaper, more reliable options as well (beyond just using Linux on their servers).

Uncle Karl was confusing Mercatilism with Capitalism

I'm sure if he had been alive, he'd have been very grateful for the correction -- not! Perhaps you might also want to look up the definition of Mercantilism

you also need to read Adam Smith to get the real feel for the ideal form of capitalism, which actually has very few workers and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of owners in any given industry

I have. As had Karl Marx, and far more assiduously than I ever bothered to. In fact, Smith's work is at least as big an influence on Marx as that of Hegel -- and I believe more so.

What Marx does in Das Kapital (and many of his other works) is to build on Smith and describe the essential features of capitalism. Not some ideal type that never existed, but the real social, economic and political phenomenon that governed the lives of men. While his political and historical predictions may have been all to cock, his analysis of capitalism and how it works was bang on the nail -- whether you agree with his assertions about the implications of that or not.

These [the Holocaust] are crimes of the past and the persons who did it are dead (...) However, the executive branch does not make the laws.

But the executive branch often initiates the laws and passes the proposed bills to the parliament. Just check the case of one Hans Globke, the guy who wrote the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 - these laws were actually the legal framework of the Holocaust. They allowed to gather Jewish citizens in ghettos and subsequently eliminate them, all according to the law (the Nuremberg Law). The very same Hans Globke was appointed Staatssekretaer (State Secretary of the Federal Republic of Germany - the highest administrative post in Germany) in 1953 and he was one of the people shaping the federal German state as we know it today. So of course you're right pointing, that he's dead but... this is the country he has shaped. Many leading public officials of the whole Adenauer era had similar skeletons in closets (technically, not exactly skeletons but rather their Nazi uniforms back from the "good old days"). Therefore there was nothing strange in the fact, that in 1963 German state police seized the office of an indepented weekly magazine - just because it was investigating a corruption case. Yes, I know that the Spiegel Scandal eventually ended in a triumph of democracy - but please observe how lightly the aspect of private property and individual freedom was treated in this case. In Germany it can't happen as well today - this is the same state with the same law. Co-written by Hans Globke and alike.

I keep wanting to change the Subject line, but "Wow". I haven't heard the word Mercantilism since grade school. Could you please explain what you mean?

Because it makes it easier for people to get along and not kill each other so much if they aren't always bickering over "my god can kick your god's ass!" type stuff.

So you would think. But it's not so. Man is just evil, regardless.

For all the "religion is the cause of all wars" tripe you hear, most wars supposedly caused by religion are really clashes of culture, or more genuinely over resources and land. Religion is usually just the patina dressed up to justify it for the proles.

Trotskyism = Stalinism (idea of permanent revolution and all).

No.

Stalin vs. Trotsky.

Sorry, wrong.

In Europe the tradition goes back to the eleventh century. This author hasn't read his history.

A quick google on "Medieval Universities" yielded this essay as first of over 2500 hits.

Why do we need some kind of reform?

Why is the "two-party duopoly" necessarily a bad thing? It might actually be a strength of the system.

Does anyone actually want to see a third party candidate in the White House? Let's see: we could elect Ralph Nader and listen to him whine about corporate crime and poverty; we could elect Browne and reduce the federal government to a shack in a Washington ghetto. There's McReynolds, who will proudly tell us how little he knows. And there's Buchanan, who will have all except white Protestants deported.

There is a reason that hard line idealists are only nominated by third parties: they are hard line idealists. Having two dominant, centrist parties keeps those idealists away from places where they could do some serious damage.

Example: between the world wars, Germany had a proportional representation scheme. Seats would be granted to a party in proportion to the fraction of the popular vote the party received. In 1930, the small National Socialist third party, which, according to this article, polled in no district more than 40%, earned 18.3% of the seats in parliament.

The principle behind American government seems to be to minimize the sort of drastic change typical of parliamentary systems. Checks and balances, the division between federal and state government, the "bloated bureaucracy", and the electoral college all have this effect. Of course, the pace of change can be too slow -- the US took an awfully long time to do something about slavery, for instance -- but it also offers stability. As someone once said in a Saturday Night Live skit, "Is there anything you can't do because your guy didn't win?" Not to suggest that there aren't problems which need to be fixed, but might this stability be better than a government built up by Nader, dismantled by Browne, and then build up by Nader again in successive terms?

The electoral college also allows people to cast "protest votes". If we used a national popular vote instead of the electoral college, a vote for Nader really would be a vote for Bush. As it is, most people can safely "vote their consciences" without affecting the outcome of the election.