Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Niall Ferguson: Are we the Soviets now?" video.

She needs to stop pitching to gatekeepers, and produce her work independently.
8
"No one has a serious solution to the most serious problems of mature European countries" -- I have one! Just grit your teeth for ten or twenty years, pour support into your local young people to get married, have LOTS of s**, and reproduce at a 2.5 or 3.0 birthrate in solid traditional father-mother-4 child families. (Normalize 4; most people will probably fall short of this goal, but if the goal is high enough that shortfall will be okay.)
2
I suspect that as soon as Georgia Meloni can afford to throw off the shackles placed upon her, she will.
2
There is still hope, in the United States. Trump is cruising to victory over a very old and feeble opponent, and he's a bull in the Managerial Class china shop. More than that, the Supreme Court just made it MUCH easier for regular Americans to sue Federal agencies in court, over misapplication of regulatory law. The Managerial Class is quietly sh**ting their pants about that one, in addition to their loudly panicking about Trump's impending victory.
1
Two vital events happened in the last week, that can lead to America manifesting itself as the true champion of freedom in this new Cold War. One, Biden demonstrated that he is a very old man incapable of being president -- which will probably put Trump in the White House. This drives our Elites (the Mandarins of the executive agencies) into a crisis. Two, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron Deference, providing regular Americans with a means of fighting back in the courts against Mandarins in the executive agencies. I'm hopeful we're headed in the right direction, moreso than in a long time.
1
"Europe still depends on the United States for security" Just by the numbers though, if you combine the "Weimar Triangle" (Poland, France, Germany) with Sweden, Finland, and Romania, doesn't the GDP and population more than counterbalance Russia and Belarus?
1
Niall, if the American government (State Department) wants us to fight for its causes, it needs to offer us freedom and prosperity. Only Trump is offering that, in this election.
1
"Do you think if we stopped supporting Ukraine and Putin took some of it, he would then say 'I'm fine now' or would he take more?" Is Putin / Russia in a position to take more, in the future? Isn't Russia in demographic free-fall, only hastened by this war? Could any breathing room be used to arm Poland / Finland / the Baltics to the teeth, giving us a steadily increasing advantage? It seems to me that time is on our side, not Putin's. Is this a miscalculation?
1
Of course both sides in this new Cold War are Soviets. Or rather, both sides have a "Mandarin" form of government. Experts with government imprimatur impose their expertise on the masses, despite our system of free speech and free inquiry generating the correct answer, contrary to the Mandarins' party line. (See: Jay Bhattacharya vs. Anthony Fauci.) This distributed cognition vs. centralized expertise is exactly analogous to the free market vs. central planning dichotomy that we saw in Cold War 1. Likewise, we are going to see Americans (and Europeans) rejecting central-planning Mandarins, as institutions and communications media arise that are capable of implementing correct answers that the distributed cognition of Free Speech and Free Inquiry produce. This is the kind of freedom that Americans are willing to fight for -- perhaps even spread to peoples all over the globe, in a Cold War 2. At first it's going to be tarred as mere "populism" or "anti-intellectualism", except there are more credible intellectuals on the side of Freedom, than there are on the side of the Mandarins.
1
My take on Taiwan is that there will be no war over Taiwan. China is simply waiting to take Taiwan, for a gap in US resolve to start a war over Taiwan. When China thinks there would be war, it will not move. If it thought there would be no war, it would pounce.
1