Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Mollie Hemingway - On The Court - \"YOUR WELCOME\" Episode #95" video.

  1. The threshold for going to war has been far too low for generations. So we get involved in a lot more scrapes. But also, in our penny wisdom, we don't follow through the violence with unmitigated generosity. As soon as we "win," we turn right around and try to get something BACK OUT of the country. In Afghanistan, we're guarding poppy fields! In Iraq, our priority was the oil fields. But in the Marshall Plan, what did we do? We gave the Japanese modern electric steel smelters that were better than the ones we used in Pittsburgh! And Japanese workers worked for pennies on the dollar! We started importing Japanese steel, making them a world leader in steel by the late '60s or early '70s (Don't quote the old man on the details, because he gets shit wrong all the time.). Remember how Detroit was freaking out about Datsun and Toyota? Same with Germany. They became an economic powerhouse. Instead of fighting over colonies and using force to secure trade routes and access to foreign goods, it was suddenly OK for Japan to import oil it didn't absolutely control in a (relatively) free international market! This is part of why globalism has so much momentum. Makes total sense to trade over longer distances for needful things. There are problems with it, when those needful things are controlled by foreign powers, so you want people playing by the rules. But generally, the average person has access to better products for less money. You just don't want to artificially cripple your own independent means of producing needful things, by letting foreign countries subsidize their products through government intervention, without an offsetting intervention, here at home, in the form of a tariff. I'm all in favor of FAIR free trade, and countries that cheat to compete should have to pay tariffs to export those subsidized products. That way, when their government cheats, it amounts to a direct payment to OUR government, without any of the little people being adversely affected, unless they LIKE the idea of cheating the average people in OTHER countries! We don't need to cheat. But we do need a keen eye on what's FAiR, and our experts should be watching other countries like hawks, and we should be setting tariffs and excise taxes to keep things as far as we can from our end, WITHOUT THE USE OF FORCE. Just, "If you're gonna play it that way, we're gonna tax the shit out of your products. Don't like the tax? Don't play that way." As a representative republic, we should ALWAYS be reluctant to use violence. We should do our best to prepare for national defense, but "democracies" should never want to go to war, until things get really bad. World War I was a mistake, but World War II was righteous, because there was a CLEAR aggressor. We geared up for total war AND we followed up with the Marshall Plan, which brought the defeated enemies into full membership as economic powerhouses, with free citizens. Nowadays, we're in a hurry to use force, but never fix what we broke when we use force. I'm one who still believes in "nation building." But only AFTER a war, like we did with the Marshall Plan after World War II. That was TRUE nation-building. We were kinder to our defeated foes than any nation in history! There've been plenty of surprisingly kind nations throughout history, who sought to re-build what war had destroyed. But the USA had more to GIVE than any nation in history, so the word was truly father to the deed. But "nation building," as it has come to be known is anything but. What we do is go in and kill a bunch of people and then we don't follow through with a huge infrastructure program, like we did in the Marshall Plan. Neocon/Neolib foreign policy is anti-American in spirit and effect.
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  2. Dems are all about POWER. The rest of us are about TRUTH and REASON. The left explicitly REJECTS reason. It's built into academia, now, due to lack of rigor in the humanities.
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