>The talk of guillotines is completely out of place by the way: the French revolution was not a bunch of peasants guillotining the rich out of envy; they were guillotining the royal family, for taxing them too much!

That is rather reductionist. At the time, the landed gentry, nobility and the church were the rich people in France. The middle class guillotined the rich because they were the ones paying all the taxes while the actual wealthy were not paying any taxes at all. I'm sure you can see the overlap with the present day sentiment.

The real reason America has such high military expenditure is more about ensuring the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by backing Saudi interests in the Middle East (and thereby ensuring that the dollar is the main currency denominating oil transactions, which ensures its global reserve status). Which gives the U.S. an upper hand on the world stage because of its currency being the reserve.

https://citizentruth.org/the-secret-deal-that-formed-the-us-...