As a European, I feel very thankful that the US has given up many of the luxuries (health care, social security, paid time off by law) we have here to fund a military to protect the world. My country has 2 fighter jets and a tank with a flat tire (hyperbole) and really depends on this. I've been vocally critical of the US defense spending, but through the Ukraine war have come to a realization we've all been spoiled and naive and feel like Europe really needs to pick up defense spending and not just in the short term.

The US could have both a large military and decent universal health care. We choose to have an economically exploitive healthcare system and retirement with the politicians we elect.

It would cost the US less as a society to have universal healthcare rather than the horror we have now.

The US has the world's largest entitlement and social welfare programs, including its vast Social Security program (which is not actually paid for in full by its recipients, it's heavily subsidized, ie a welfare transfer) or eg its $120 billion EBT food program. And that's just at the federal level, the US has another gigantic government complex at the state level.

Most US government spending, $10 trillion (federal + state + local), goes to social welfare programs and entitlements.

That $10 trillion is larger than the entire economies of Japan + Germany combined.

The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, by far. It hasn't given up anything.

The poorest 1/4 of the US population gets entirely free healthcare, and it's the most expensive free healthcare that you'll find anywhere on the planet. Another quarter of the US population receives directly subsidized healthcare.

Over-spending on the US military is a $200-$250 billion problem. The US spends $4+ trillion on healthcare every year.

Practically every full-time employee (32 hours or more per week) in the US gets paid time off. Your average retail store employee - working at CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc - earning ~$13-$17 / hour typically accrues 10-14 days of PTO per year (one can certainly argue it should be more; pretending it doesn't exist, or using "by law" to devalue its existence, is absurd).

Don't forget them lucky 1/2 percenters who get free healthcare, food, residence, and leisure time! I'm talking about the incarcerated 1.7m in the Land of the Free.

Close, but it's actually a bit over 700/100k, so >0.7% of the population.

Yeah this isn’t a money problem it’s an inefficiency problem at this rate. There are systemic problems here (of the systems engineering kind not the racial justice kind).

I think the US could afford both proper health care/social security and the current military, but of course they would have to try it first to see if it works...

I think it's possible too, and I'm sure the military can/always is trying to cut money corners where it can so as to keep within budget, but I'm sure it all comes down to some massive cut in the military likely requiring us to decommit from some massive objective we currently are ahead on. Making sure we have enough presence to keep the South China Sea open, have enough equipment to give to countries we are allied with who have large enemies (see Ukraine, Taiwan), hold on to allies in strategic regions (see Israel - though I don't agree with what they do with equipment), be prepared for self defense or "necessary wars", be prepared to deploy to Europe because they underspend, maintain the nuclear arsenal so there's no catastrophe there, etc etc. No one wants to be the president who cut the budget so we lost in that field.

> I'm sure the military can/always is trying to cut money corners where it can

I doubt it. When the budget is billions of largely unaudited dollars and a senate that will approve any budget increases what reason is there to save money? I can’t imagine the nepotism found in military contracts are saving the military money when these companies gaining the contracts want as much tax-payer money as possible.

The US pays about 5x per health service used compared to the OECD. Every reduction in spend would result in massive job losses in overhead that keep our house of cards from collapsing.

I was about to say it could fully defund the military and still not fully tackle healthcare and poverty problems. Especially if interest rates on government debt starts going up.

The reality is our debt servicing (interest) will outpace our military spending soon.

> Gray area.

I'm sure you believe you set something straight but you did not. Two things can be true at the same time and still not be in any kind of gray area.

Can you get out of a murder charge by saving someone else's life? Walk into a hospital and save one patient's life while stabbing the other to death? Rape someone but then give them a job that provides for everything? Pay for the preservation of an endangered animal only after you get the chance to kill some of the very same animals? You think Harvey Weinstein didn't pay the tuition or put a roof over one of his victim's heads? Yeah, think of him in the gray area.

Can you give me your example above and proudly proclaim "grey area" without sounding like the kind of person who thinks any wrongdoing gets wiped with a gesture of good will?

P.S. Gray should be the thin border where white and black touch and intermingle, not the whole damn thing except the white/black edges. That might ebb and flow and drift with generations and society but this moment is not it.

Can we decide that saving a victim from violence by applying violence to an aggressor is net positive? Yes, absolutely

Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you? Yes, absolutely it is a trick question.

Are you aware of any case where the US went to war under pretenses known to be false from the start, or interfered in the internal affairs of another country to cause loss of life, or allied with countries that committed terrorism against the US and others, etc. and none of the initiators suffered any consequences?

It's bad enough that morals can be twisted enough to justify just about anything and in any condition, and education these days lets anyone think they can justify anything simply by the fact that they said it. Don't add hypocrisy to that too.

>Do you apply this principle consistently or only when and how it suits you?

Of course, I do. Not to say I don't have biases, or that I'm always have an access to 100% correct information. Life's not that easy, of course, but it still doesn't mean that it's always blurry, relative, and let's do nothing as your nihilist approach suggests.

And then when in your 'aggressive defense' you end up hurting somebody else who now uses the exact same logic to start attacking you? This is how war (and terrorism) perpetuate endlessly.

It only ends when one side or the other, and anybody who might have empathized with them, is completely annihilated or when somebody stops behaving, from their perspective, righteously. Neither option is probable, which is why society just keeps replaying history on an endless loop in history, with little more than technology offering a change of scenery.

If you want to see what will happen tomorrow, simply learn about what happened yesterday. The only trick is realizing what role you're playing.

We have historical experience which pretty clearly shows that not increasing the price of aggression surely doesn't stop it. Contrary to what feel-good gurus say about "breaking the cycle of violence", in real life, it only breaks when the price of continuing is getting too high. And yes, when it comes to war it's definitely not a fairytale with all good men rewarded, and bad men punished. So if you wanted to say to that war is bad - I think almost nobody would oppose it. Not answering with weapons to weapons means there will be more of it, however.

This would justify any number of attacks on the US.

They can certainly give it their best shot if they want to deal with the consequences. That's how the world actually works. Institutions like the UN are almost entirely powerless when it comes down to it, while eg NATO or the various militarily powerful nations are not. You can witness that with what has gone on in the invasion of Ukraine, what has the UN stopped or prevented? Nothing. The same will hold true when China invades Taiwan one day.

The countries with potent military capabilities dictate how everything goes in this world. It was true a thousand years ago, it was true a hundred years ago, and it's true today. It will always be true, for very obvious reasons.

Ok. Where did I say anything to the contrary.

Society breaks down if we follow this principle.

I feel they set it straight. You, on the other hand, don't seem to commit to any point but instead digress wildly between one half-baked example to the next with a postscript that could as well be a theory on color science.

We've been trying to avoid US soldiers fighting Russian soldiers for decades now; it'll look a lot worse than the Holodomor v2 if nukes start flying.

Given that they aren't, I suspect we'll find that US soldiers aren't technically involved in the fight in Ukraine. It is ironic that even now, US soldiers are only deployed for aggressive purposes.

US soldiers during the post WW2 era are overwhelmingly deployed for non-directly aggressive purposes in fact. They're deployed as a standing deterrent to regimes looking to conquer other nations.

That includes in Japan, South Korea and various nations in Europe (Germany, Italy, Poland, et al.). By the hour, those locations have seen the largest and longest-term US military deployments in its history. They're not there to start wars, they're there to deter the aggressors (Russia, North Korea, China primarily) from attempting to conquer their neighbors and annex more territory.

The soldiers have no say what missions or assignments they are put on. They do, however, have families and lives and dreams they would like to return to. Isn’t it ethical to allow these individuals to increase their chances to return home, regardless they f what command assigns them to do and whether those plans in and of themselves are ethical?

Russia and Ukraine had many disagreements since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The moment that relations really took a turn for the worse was after Ukraine started flirting with NATO and to a lesser extent EU, at which point Russia took Crimea and tensions started in the East.

Ukraine then continued to align and train with NATO, the Minsk accords failed and Russia invaded. At this point, our best understanding is that they wanted to enact quick regime change and re-align the country’s position to Russia. As to your reference to Holodomor 2, there’s no indication that they wanted to commit genocide or force a large scale famine.

Russia’s actions in Georgia, Belarus or Crimea itself indicate the more likely fate of Ukraine. Of course the problem with an escalation spiral is that there’s no telling where it will end up. Still, considering that Ukraine’s allowing gas exports to transit their country and Russia’s allowing grain exports, the relation is not as hopeless as you make it seem.

As for the US’s contribution to the Ukraine war effort, paradoxically, the US support and NATO courting them were likely an important trigger of the invasion. And the US support which enabled Ukraine’s resistance means that it’s now trapped in a spiral of violence with Russia that is tearing both countries apart.

We can’t know what could have been, but looking at other neighbors of Russia’s an alternative reality where Ukraine remains corrupt, poor, in Russia’s sphere of influence but whole is not unlikely.

Holodomor is some propaganda though. Everyone involved thought is was going do great things, and it failed because modernism wasn't as great as expected